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When the story about Michael Floyd came out earlier today, a lot of people probably suspected that Floyd’s story about his high blood alcohol content coming from consumption of a drink called Kombucha didn’t sound terribly feasible.
Fortunately, with this being the internet and everything, someone took the time to do the math and figure out exactly how unfeasible it is.
Bryan Kalbrosky of USA Today actually did the math to figure out exactly how much Kombucha it would have been necessary for Floyd to consume to attain the blood alcohol level that he did. The answer, not surprisingly, is “a whole lot.”
According to Kalbrosky’s story, the ABV (or alcohol by volume) of Kombucha is approximately 0.5%. For comparison, beer at the low end of the ABV scale sits at about 2%, so even the weakest beer you can find is about four times as strong as Kombucha.
Kalbrosky figured out how much Kombucha a person Floyd’s size (approximately 225 pounds) would have had to consume to get his BAC up to the .044 that Floyd registered on the low end of his tests. Using a blood alcohol calculator, he figured out that Floyd would have had to consume 384 ounces of Kombucha.
In an hour.
To help you visualize that a bit, picture a 24-pack of your favorite canned beverage, whether it’s beer or pop. . .yes, pop, not soda. . .or what have you. Now picture eight more cans on top of that. That’s 384 ounces. And, again, you’d have to do it in 60 minutes.
Even coming from someone that loves his pop, just the thought of trying to put away 32 cans of Barq’s or Mountain Dew in 60 minutes is enough to make my stomach queasy. Something like Kombucha? Not a chance.
I suppose that Michael Floyd could have come up with a worse excuse. I’m not sure how, but I suppose there’s a way he could have. Basically, I think that it’s best that we not get too attached to the idea of Floyd making a comeback with the Vikings after all. Hopefully we haven’t already. We’ll find out more when Floyd heads back to court on 26 June.
Be sure to check out the rest of Bryan Kalbosky’s article for a couple more interesting links and more info about Kombucha than you can probably handle.