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Can man live off beer alone? Paul Myhill, known on social media as @colorado_beer_guy, certainly can. Myhill is about to complete his third Lenten beer fast, where he consumes nothing but beer—this year it was only Guinness—for 46 days straight.
Since February 13, Myhill has ingested only Guinness, water, vitamins, and electrolytes (for previous fasts, he drank a combination of beer styles and brands). The Castle Rock–based brewery expert got the beer fast idea from 17th-century German Paulaner monks, who’d use the “liquid bread” to power them through Lent, the 40-day period (excluding Sundays) of prayer and fasting that leads up to Easter. While Myhill isn’t Catholic, he is a big-time beer nerd—he visited all 467 Colorado breweries in an 18-month period between 2020 and 2021—and the idea of subsisting on nothing but beer appealed to him. When he’s not knocking back pints, Myhill works as a dietary supplement formulator and also calls himself a “serial entrepreneur” who starts and sells businesses.
“I’m doing it for the personal challenge,” he says. “I like to collect experiences. I’m always doing some sort of quest, so this is just a fun thing to do.”
He’s set to end the fast on Saturday, March 30, and instead of making a beeline for pizza or a burger, he says he’ll end his beer fast with…more beer. Myhill will be at Saturday’s Collaboration Beer Fest—an event he calls Holy Saturday that exclusively features suds jointly created by multiple breweries—where he’ll skip food and instead indulge in those local craft beers he’s been missing.
“I’m actually craving my Colorado craft beers more than food,” he says. “It’s tough to be the Colorado beer guy and go 46 days without a Colorado craft beer.”
Myhill admits that “no doctor on the planet would recommend” a Lenten beer fast, but it’s been working well for him. This year he’s down 35 pounds and says he feels fantastic, with increased energy and mental clarity. As a fan of pub fare like fish and chips and bangers and mash, he says this period might be the healthiest he “eats” all year. (Myhill is currently in the midst of a personal challenge to visit every British and Irish pub along the Front Range, because of course he is.)
The second time he did a beer fast, he had his vitals checked before and after, and his liver enzyme activity actually got better after a month and half of consuming nothing but brews. “I had the [liver] levels of a young man,” Myhill says. “If you’re not eating sugary, toxic foods for 46 days, your liver is actually thanking you. It sounds strange saying I’m doing a cleanse with Guinness, but it is a cleanse.”
However, extreme calorie-restrictive diets like this, even if they involve fun things like beer, are easier to do if you have extra fat reserves to tap into. So Myhill doesn’t recommend this for people with a smaller body type. As a self-described “bigger guy,” Myhill says he had 40 pounds or so to lose, and it’s important to know your own body and what it needs.
He also stresses that this isn’t an excuse to be drunk for weeks on end; it’s actually quite the opposite. At first he drank six Guinness pints a day to ease his body into the caloric restriction, but after the first week, he switched to three pints and now he’s down to just two pints a day.
“It’s not a drunk fest,” Myhill says. “People get the wrong idea. The original monks doing this in the 1600s, they certainly weren’t using it as a drunk fest. That was against their vows.”
Myhill’s motivations may be a little less religious and a little more beer-obsessed, but he’s treating his Lenten fast with the same amount of reverence. And Guinness: If you’re out there reading this, give Myhill a call. “If Guinness said they’d pay me back for all the beer I’ve bought doing this,” he says, “that’d be nice.”
Celebrate the end of Myhill’s fast at Collaboration Fest this Saturday, March 30, at the Westin Westminster, and follow @colorado_beer_guy on Instagram and Facebook.
