How many ways can this shithead get it wrong?
The main ingredient is SuperYeast, a fast-acting yeast available in home-brewing stores. Mixed in a pail with sugar and water, one pouch can make 25 litres of superjuice in just a couple of days.Tasty! But, uuh, just about any wine yeast will do the same.
"The standard price of a two-litre bottle of superjuice is $80."Jesus H Christ, you could be getting tanked on Super Tuscans for less. I thought weed was cheap in Canada?
"People drunk on superjuice are prone to violence, wild emotional outbursts, suicidal thoughts and frequent blackouts, Wood said. "With regular alcohol you can know what you are doing up to a point, but with superjuice you can't control yourself," he said.Uuuh, yeah. Shotgun a bottle of Jack and you're cool as Fonzie, but drink super magical superjuice U R BEYOND MR ROBOTO CONTROL FUCT CRAAZY!
"A lot of the times you can hear them screaming in the police holding cells (because) the stuff is still fermenting in their stomach," he said. "It keeps them drunk too because it is still in their system and still cooking. A lot of the time we have to detain these kids a little bit longer because they can stay drunk for so long."Wow, that sounds like an advantage that could be marketed. How has Seagrams not picked up on this yet? "New Thunderbird, Three Day Bender edition."
"Screaming in their cells" because of some gas in their stomach? They're too drunk to fart and belch? Crazy Canadians!
If anything besides massive alcohol consumption is screwing with their stomachs it's probably some bacterial infection they picked up from their unsterilized hooch-brewin jugs.
"Police do what they can to intercept the yeast before it gets to the reserve, often seizing it from arriving passengers at the St. Theresa Point and Garden Hill airports."Because yeast is, uuh, illegal? Well they'd better also suck all the air out of the reserve, because it's full of the shit!
Here are some clues for morons in the press: "Super" or not, a yeast well-suited to survive in high-alcohol environments will ferment out to between 12-18% alcohol before dying. That's it. If you could get 40% Jack straight outa yeast you can be sure Johnny Law would have smashed a lot fewer stills during prohibition.
The real story: an idiot reporter trying to make news that a new powerful drug is responsible for the bad actions of the local reprobates. You've heard it before: "today's weed is 60 times more potent than the shit your parents smoked," etc etc.
Screw superjuice. For blotto-on-the-cheap, go with Purell.
8 comments:
Sounds suspiciously like the hysteria surrounding absinthe; the move toward banning it started after some Swiss dude killed his family in the early 1900s and it was found he'd been drinking the stuff.
Of course, he'd also had creme de menthe, cognac, seven glasses of wine, brandy-laced coffee, another litre of wine, and another slug of brandy. But it was those two glasses of 'sinthe that put him over the edge ... I tells ya, the yeast ban is a-comin'!
I misread the headline. I thought this was about Kevin Youkilis. My bad.
It's pretty clear this Wood character from the article is going for some some good old fear mongering. He's either making shite up to scare people or is a badly misinformed idiot.
What's more, if this yeast is so hard to get into town and the product is so valuable you'd think one of these bootleggers would have learned how to propagate their own damn yeast by now. Properly handled one packet of yeast could make all the SuperJuice the town wants.
A clever counterfeiter could make up some fake packets and fill them with bread yeast. The price per jar makes it clear the drink's reputation is far more important that it's actual alcohol content and bread yeast can probably get near 12% to 15% anyway.
You guys have no clue. Your sitting pretty in your moms basement in urban areas....not realizing the truths of life in northern canada....dont believe what you see in the movies....come to winnipeg Manitoba and fly up to st theresa point....see for yourselves!! Oh wait....you never leave mommies basement....Google this in ur pathetic basement "office"where u likely spend most of your days....
Oh...I am edwin wood.....the probation officer who spoke about what is actually happening in remote canada.... YOU are the one who is the idiot!! No clue about the 3rd world conditions in our communities.
It's called Auto-Brewery Syndrome. It happens when there's persistent and chronic infection of an alcohol producing organism.
http://journals.lww.com/jpgn/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2001&issue=08000&article=00024&type=fulltext
If the people really are exhibiting the symptoms described in the article then it's a symptom of a MAJOR immune deficiency in the population. These people should be getting medical attention for whatever is trashing their immune systems to the point where they can't fight off a little yeast. Alcoholism may be a factor in suppressing the immune system in adults, but in teenagers? Not likely.
Infections disease doctor Mark Crislip will occasionally reference a former patient of his on his podcast "Quackcast." The patient was an HIV+ homebrewer and had a chronic yeast infection in his bloodstream. Dr. Crislip quipped that the patient knew what "Aled" him. Bad pun aside, that's one level of immune suppression needed for yeast to get a strong enough foothold in the human body to actively ferment carbohydrates and sugars into alcohol. Even a moderately healthy person isn't going to suffer from Auto-Brewery Syndrome as yeast is one of those organisms that doesn't fare well in our digestive tracts or bloodstream. You can't get drunk off the yeast in a vaginal yeast infection or thrush.
I see three ways to interpret the article.
1. There are a lot of First Nations peoples on these reservations with MAJOR immune disorders that are going untreated and undiagnosed.
2. There's another drug problem in the area and homebrew is being scapegoated.
3. The article has too much hyperbole and fear mongering to tease out the facts.
Since you're a law enforcement professional, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume #3 is an unlikely option. If you've been focused on alcohol as a disruptive factor then you can be forgiven for overlooking #2. Since you're not a doctor and have no reason to have an above average understanding of yeast, it is perfectly reasonable for #1 to have completely escaped you.
If you really have people coming in who are fermenting alcohol in their bodies, I suspect you could end up looking like a visionary and a hero if you started shipping them off to get tested for possible immune disorders. Superyeast isn't tough enough to explain what's described in the article. It can handle a higher alcohol level than champagne yeast, but it can't bitchslap a healthy immune system the way necessary to get the effects described in the article.
Oh, this is just TOO precious. John Ryan is claiming to be Edwin Wood and has spent a few months trying to start an argument with me about this nonsense. The sad thing is she / he hasn't even TRIED to address my ACTUAL comment about Auto-Brewery Syndrome and has instead chosen to keep talking about substance abuse and the difficulty of life in rural areas. By doing so Ryan / Wood is arguing against not what I actually wrote, but a fanciful straw man that represents claims I'm not even making.
thank you for your info Mathew Miller. i work in a northern remote community..the only way in or out is plane and the roads here were only built in the last 20 years.
My comment however has to do with the price. the reason the cost is so high (retail) is because its a fly in community. EVERYTHING costs more here. a 4 dollar sub in the city costs 10 dollars here, as an example. a 2 liter of coke costs 8 dollars. a dry reserve, like the one i am on, superjuice helps earn cash for food, clothes and trips out.
economics, racism, isolation and limited opportunity feeds addiction. and yes, overcrowding. imagine 8 grown people in a two bedroom house. thats an isolated northern reserve. everything here costs a fortune.
rhiannon,
Personally, I think prohibition is a paternalistic and insulting way to deal with a public health issue. It criminalizes a normal activity and, by making it illegal, creates significant stigmas around efforts to get help. We tried it nationally in the USA, and ended up creating an organized crime and smuggling infrastructure that transitioned to harder drugs when alcohol was finally legalized again in the states.
If you're going to produce alcohol, you might as well save some time and money through yeast washing: http://homebrewacademy.com/yeast-washing/
There's no need to keep ordering new batches of the yeast, especially given the logistics of shipping, when you can brew for ages off the same well-maintained yeast cake.
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