This Hangover Cure Will Triple Beer Sales, Just In Time For The Weekend

How much would a hangover cure change your life?

There are tons of products on the market that purport to deliver just that, but who wants to spend all the money to find out if they work?

Well, Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company may have just made the job a lot easier. In a recent post from Esquire, writer Aaron Goldfarb stumbled upon Koch’s secret to drinking all day and never getting drunk.

Yeast!

Goldfarb writes:

“Active yeast. Like you get at the grocery store.”

Koch told me that for years he has swallowed your standard Fleischmann’s dry yeast before he drinks, stirring the white powdery substance in with some yogurt to make it more palatable.

“One teaspoon per beer, right before you start drinking.”

Goldfarb decided to try out the recommendation himself the next day stating, “I grabbed a six-pack of beer and a packet of Fleischmann’s and went to work. The older I get, the more of a lightweight I surely become, but after shoveling down six teaspoons and tilting back six bottles I felt nothing more than a little buzzed.”

Citing the work of the late fermentation scientist Joseph Owades, who worked for Fleischmann’s, Goldfarb explains how the hangover cure works:

You see, what Owades knew was that active dry yeast has an enzyme in it called alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH). Roughly put, ADH is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Which is the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in its liver. Owades realized if you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking it down before it gets into your bloodstream and, thus, your brain.

“And it will mitigate – not eliminate – but mitigate the effects of alcohol!” Koch told me.

While Koch’s hangover cure certainly isn’t the first we’ve heard about, it’s certainly made a believer out of Goldfarb as well as the comments section over at Esquire.

One commenter said it was, “Probably not practical for ‘on-the-road’ drinking, but for an experiment at home, it worked.” Also: “This guy might be my new hero!”

Other recent suggestions for a hangover cure have included Pedialyte and a spicy Asian soup nicknamed “Old Sober.”

However, Koch’s seems to be the best bet in our estimation. And just to clarify, that’s one teaspoon before each beer, though we’re not entirely sure what would happen if you took, say, eight teaspoons before eight beers. We’re also not sure how effective it would be with harder liquor. But when it comes to beer, Fleischmann’s has your back!

[Image via Flickr Creative Commons]