Gut Reaction
The Inside Job
Craft brewing is having a moment. Everybody knows a guy with a garage setup and a chalkboard menu, ready to pour you a small-batch hazy IPA with notes of grapefruit and ambition. It's practically a personality trait now.
Eric Poulin has a brewery too. It's just... inside him.
The Nova Scotia father of five has auto-brewery syndrome — a rare condition where the microbes in his gut ferment carbs into ethanol faster than his body can clear it. Translation: garlic bread, a bowl of pasta, and a soda could cause him to blow 0.2 on a breathalyzer.
For Eric, an evening at the Olive Garden isn't a family dinner — it's a bar crawl. Unlimited breadsticks, the never-ending pasta bowl... When you're here, you're hammered.
I don't drink alcohol, but I know enough people who enjoy the process of going from sober to sauced — even though they pay for it the next day. This is not that. Eric gets all of the hangover with none of the party. His gut is basically Zach Galifianakis — well-meaning, deeply unqualified, and personally responsible for every blackout.
And here's the part that'd make a brewmaster weep…the yeast most often to blame is saccharomyces cerevisiae — the exact same strain breweries use. So Eric's stomach isn't just making alcohol. It's making it right. He's pretty much running a fully operational microbrewery but can't even charge admission.
Auto-brewery syndrome is astonishingly rare, with fewer than 100 documented cases worldwide according to the Cleveland Clinic. For years no one believed Eric was telling the truth. ABS has kept him out of work since 2023 because the slurred speech, booze on his breath, and time he couldn't account for all pointed to the "obvious" story.
But unlike T-Pain, Eric can't blame it on the al-al-al-al-alcohol.
He can only blame it on the al-al-al-al dente.
The Sniff Test
As absurd as Eric's situation is, the cruel part isn't that his body makes alcohol.
It's that the truth sounds exactly like a lie.
Every visible sign pointed to the obvious story: Eric has a drinking problem. And the obvious story is the one that sticks, because it's the one that doesn't ask anybody to believe something hard.
We don't have Eric's condition. But we all ferment something we never poured.
The anxiety that shows up as a clipped reply.
The burnout that looks like carelessness.
The crisis at home that comes out as a short fuse.
And at work, people read the output, not the cause.
The ADHD that reads as "disorganized."
The autistic candor that reads as "not a team player."
The depression that reads as "checked out."
In every case, there's a true explanation. And in every case, the true explanation sounds like an excuse.
So we do the thing Eric never could: we let the believable lie stand instead of offering the unbelievable truth.
"I had an off week" survives the room.
"This is how my brain works" does not.
Eric spent years being read by his breath instead of believed by his word. Explaining was never the hard part. Being believed is. We just get filed away — and the file doesn't record what was true. Only what was easy to assume.
The believable lie almost always wins.
Question of the Week
What's the true thing you've stopped explaining at work — because the honest version sounds too much like an excuse?
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