I first started brewing beer while I was going to school to become a pharmacist. Today I’m a clinical pharmacist and still love to brew. After I graduated from pharmacy school, I became a pharmacist at a local community hospital and have been there for more than 25 years. I started brewing way back in the mid 1970’s and about a decade or so later a friend of mine and I started brewing together. My friend, Sam, was also a carpenter and together we constructed an outbuilding on my property that was supposed to be a garage with some additional storage space. Instead it soon was turned into a “Brew House” and we started a homebrew club named the Hop River Brewers, named for the river that runs behind our brewhouse.

Being a hospital clinical pharmacist, the doctors, nurses and patients often rely on my professional skills for information and advice concerning administration of medications. Recently, I combined both my pharmacy professional skills and my experienced brewing skills.

One of the gastroenterologists at the hospital where I work requested that the pharmacy obtain a medication named Florastor® for his patients with severe gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel disease, colitis and other gastrointestinal (GI) problems.

I did some research into Florastor® and discovered some interesting facts. The medication he requested is classified as a probiotic drug. Probiotics are names given to a class of medications which are designed to help replenish the bodies natural gut flora which by doing so may be able to reverse or prevent many severe gastrointestinal problems. For years the probiotics lactobacillus and acidophilus, active strains of live bacteria, often found in yogurt have also been used to treat these conditions. The probiotic our doctor requested (Florastor®) was the name given by its manufacturer, Biocodex, Inc., to its capsules, which contained a strain of live freeze-dried brewers yeast called Saccharomyces boulardii.

The history of the origin of this strain of yeast is as follows: Sometime in the 1920s a French microbiologist named Henri Boulard had traveled to Indochina. By chance he happened to observe some of the native population using a tea brewed from the fruit skins of a berry from a tree with the name Litchi chinensis to combat diarrhea during a cholera epidemic. He was intrigued, and being a microbiologist he eventually managed to isolate a strain of yeast that may have been responsible for this health benefit. This strain of yeast was later named Saccharomyces boulardii after this French man and in time became commercialized, first in Europe after World War II, and more recently in the US. It has been studied for many decades and has shown very good results for a variety of GI conditions.

I’ve known this doctor for many years and after researching the benefits of this medication the pharmacy elected to obtain some capsules of this Saccharomyces boulardii for his patients that may present with these gastrointestinal disorders. The drug was somewhat expensive and I jokingly told him that I have plenty of Saccharomyces at home, especially after brewing a batch of beer. He laughed but told me that the research was done using this strain of yeast.

Some of my research revealed that other strains of Saccharomyces may have similar benefits. As a pharmacist and a brewer I was quite curious to see if this strain of brewers yeast could produce a decent beer and thus I decided to make an experimental brew using this Saccharomyces boulardii strain of yeast. I didn’t go overboard, and after opening the capsules to make a starter with some dry malt that started fermenting within 24 hours I decided to make a simple brown ale using a basic beer kit as I had done in my early days of homebrewing.

The beer fermented well and tasted fairly right for its simple style. There was a hint of clove or banana flavor which might indicate that this strain of Saccharomyces isolated by the French man Boulardii might be more in line with a wheat yeast strain. And some notes in the literature I read did mention that this yeast survived higher temperatures than some other strains of yeast. So, perhaps the next batch of beer I brew using this yeast should be either a German hefeweizen wheat or Belgium wit brew.

Anyway, I ended up bottling the beer and giving a couple of six-packs to the gastroenterologist that asked the pharmacy to obtain this probiotic. I was going to label the beer “Poop Brown Ale” but decided to be more appropriate (and politically correct) and named it “Gee I Want a Beer.” It was big hit and a few weeks later I was invited to a lecture on probiotics at a local restaurant and asked to bring some of my beer.

The question that remains is, can any unfiltered, unpasteurized brew be helpful with these GI problems? The answer is probably yes, although few studies have been done using beer or other strains of brewers yeast to treat these GI conditions. These days, yogurt, acidophilus and other probiotics are becoming quite popular and are available at many pharmacies and health stores. Would wheat beers offer more value than lagers or ales? Who knows, but slugging that last remnant of cloudy yeast at the bottom of beer bottles may end up being a cure or preventative for many GI problems.