California

Hundreds of gallons of homemade booze found before inmate Super Bowl party, CA jail says

Officers at a San Francisco Bay Area jail confiscated an enormous stash of homebrew alcohol concocted by prisoners for a Super Bowl blowout party, sheriff’s officials say.

“There will be no super bowl party at Santa Rita Jail tomorrow,” the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department wrote on an Instagram post Saturday showing officers posing with trash bags of green-, yellow-, blue- and orange-colored alcohol.

The concoction, called pruno, is commonly produced in prisons and jails by fermenting “fruit, sugar, water, and other common ingredients for several days in a sealed plastic bag,” reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But it’s also a recipe for botulism, particularly since the process isn’t exactly sanitary, the CDC warns.

Jail officers often find smaller stashes of the pungent homebrew alcohol, but learned prisoners were “going big” for the Super Bowl, said Sgt. Ray Kelly, The San Francisco Chronicle reports. No one will face charges for hiding the alcohol.

“Never fun to ruin a good party, but in this case the party is over before it started,” Kelly said, according to the publication. “We will all watch the Super Bowl today at Santa Rita sober.”

The San Francisco 49ers face the Kansas City Chiefs today (February 2) in Super Bowl 54 in Miami.

Related Stories from Sacramento Bee
DS
Don Sweeney
The Sacramento Bee
Don Sweeney has been a newspaper reporter and editor in California for more than 35 years. He is a service reporter based at The Sacramento Bee.
Get one year of unlimited digital access for $159.99
#ReadLocal

Only 44¢ per day

SUBSCRIBE NOW