If I were in Prague I would be able to soak in a bathtub full of beer while being served unlimited quantities of said brew for consumption. But since I’m in Staten Island, the closest thing I can have to that experience is a 40 oz. and my own personal bathtub – which I had to clean out myself.

I became interested in beer baths when I saw a news report about them. It looked like a gimmicky thing the beer-abundant Czech Republic does for tourists — and was immediately added to my bucket list. It turns out, there are claims that beer baths are detoxifiers.

I’ve done a lot of things to ‘detox’ — diets, mud baths, hot yoga for days — but none of them involved beer. In fact, beer was something I was trying to detox from with all of those methods. So the beer bath concept seemed counterproductive — drinking the toxins in the beer only to have them pulled out of your skin by the beer bath water. It sounds like a vicious cycle.

Get the latest in beer, wine, and cocktail culture sent straight to your inbox.

When I looked into it further, I realized you don’t need a whole tub of beer to reap the alleged benefits of a beer bath. You just need a couple cups of beer in a warm water bath. Simple enough. I poured the Bud in while the tub was still filling up and my bathroom immediately started to smell like a beer-soaked wood floor in dive bar. The things I do for research, but in I went! It felt good after the sweaty workout I had just done to help the detox process along. Since I only needed 16 ounces for the bath, that left a whole 24 ounces for drinking. In case you haven’t heard, drinking beer is great after a workout.

Adding beer to bath water.

I soaked, drank my beer, and read a book for 30 minutes. Then it was over. I took a shower afterward because if any toxins had been pulled from my skin I wanted them all down the drain. I can’t say the bath made me feel any better, lighter, or cleaner than I did pre-bath. Even a few days later, I can’t really tell if there’s any validity to the detox claims.

Overall, no harm was done either. I can’t complain about the price of my home spa treatment. That Bud only cost $3.75. I don’t know how that stacks up in the 40’s market, but when I compare it to money I’ve spent on fancy soaps and bubble bath, it’s definitely a bargain. The beer smell is gone from the bathroom and my skin didn’t adversely react to the beer either.

The worst part of the whole experience was buying the 40. My deli guy has, without judgement, sold me lots of candy, lottery tickets, and hangover-curing Sunday morning egg sandwiches over the years, but I don’t know what he was thinking about me while ringing up my oversized beer at 11am on a Tuesday.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to cross ‘beer spa’ off my bucket list with this experiment. I’m coming for ‘ya, Prague!