@rbl Inquiring minds wanted to know more about beer & mycobacteria! I found this blog, sounds good to me.

For your husband:

What makes beer antibacterial?
Ignoring its chemistry, the main antibacterial aspect of beer is its preparation – long boils kill pretty much any pathogen, leaving behind only a few viable spores. These spores typically do not survive fermentation, meaning that brewing a beer can clean up nearly any water source.

Chemically, beer is not antibacterial due to any one compound, but rather due to a combination of things. Alcohol, for example, can inhibit a number of pathogens, but other pathogens do just fine in the presence of alcohol. As an extreme example, the pathogen Mycobacterium nonchromogenicum can survive over 75% ethanol. So while ethanol kills some pathogens, others are pretty much oblivious to its presence. Sadly, with the broad availability (and massive mis-use) of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, ethanol-resistant pathogens are becoming ever more prevalent.

Hop compounds also inhibit some bacteria – specifically, members of the gram positive group of bacteria. But this lethality is not universal among the gram-positives (e.g. hop-resistant lacto strains are still gram-positive), and of course these compounds don’t do squat for gram-negative and other non-gram positive pathogens.

Finally, there is the acidity of the wort. Most beers finish below pH 4.5, which is the threshold for antibacterial acidity. But many pathogens have no issue with low pH’s – indeed, any pathogen that enters via our guts must be able to survive several hours in our stomach, which has a pH around 2; or nearly 100X more acidic than your average beer.

Overall, none of these chemical characteristics are sufficient to keep beer pathogen-free – most pathogens will survive fine if exposed to just one of the above antibacterial compounds; but the combination of the three is lethal to most bacteria.

from https://suigenerisbrewing.com/index.php/2014/02/18/fact-or-fiction-can-pathogens-survive-in-beer/