By Brent McKnight | 7 years ago

Here’s a great bit of news for those among with a penchant for imbibing that bubbly adult beverage commonly known as beer. The worst thing about excessive drinking is the rampant dehydration the morning after having one or two or ten pints too many. You know those days, when you feel like your body is made out of beef jerky. Fortunately for all of us, a group of enterprising Australian scientists have developed beer that hydrates you as you drink. Life just got a little bit better for some of us, and those pesky hangovers have become that much less severe.

A team of researchers at Griffith University in Queensland have discovered a way to significantly improve the overall hydrating effects of beer. God bless science. This team—these heroes—has developed a way to add electrolytes to beer without it impacting the flavor. Electrolytes are soluble salts that allow the body to maintain proper hydration levels by absorbing moisture. They probably sound familiar from all those Gatorade commercials you see on TV.

Though you don’t usually think of knocking back a cold brew after strenuous exercise, that’s exactly what they did. The team whipped up new strains of two different commercial beers—one regular, one light—and gave them to test subjects that had just completed a taxing workout in order to test their fluid recovery. The volunteers had either the regular or altered versions, and according to the tests, the electrolyte enhanced light beer scored the best for rehydration. Associate professor Ben Desbrow said, “Of the four different beers the subjects consumed, our augmented light beer was by far the most well retained by the body, meaning it was the most effective at re-hydrating the subjects.”

The researchers aimed at a smaller, practical target, one with daily applications. The logic behind this study is that people are going to drink. Years of telling them not to, and little historical epochs like Prohibition, have proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and these scientists hope to at least minimize the dehydration. Drinking is a regular part of our lives as social animals. Desbrow said, “If you’re going to live in the real world, you can either spend your time telling people what they shouldn’t do, or you can work on ways of reducing the danger of some of these socialized activities.”

So maybe this isn’t curing cancer, developing technology to reverse environmental degradation, or exploring the uncharted regions of space, but these developments will make mornings a little more bearable for many folks. And for that, let’s all raise a frost, refreshing mug and salute these visionaries, these friends of the drinking man. There’s no word about when this new advancement may find its way to the shelves of a convenience store near you, but knowing that it’s out there, waiting for us, makes all the difference.