not a fan of Richler,
but it's an interesting article nonetheless...
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The goo in your brew
They're not listed, but 109 ingredients are allowed in a Canadian beer
Jacob Richler
National Post
Thursday, June 10, 2004
It is hard to say whether a cold beer tastes best now, as the summer heat stickily sets in, or easing along the hockey game in the middle of frigid January. But the important thing is that beer tastes good most days, and if most Canadians were to add up the beers downed over the course of the year as the family doctor recommends, they would find they had drunk a lot of it.
"Alcohol is culturally important," says Liam McKenna, the award-winning former brewmaster at Connor's and the Dublin Brewing Co. who is now at work in Toronto designing a new beer geared to the Asian palate. "We should endeavour to protect those consumers and give them choices."
McKenna is talking about labelling. For it is surely an anomaly that -- in these days of keenly increased consumer awareness regarding food and where it comes from -- the law should not require that anything at all be marked on a bottle of beer other than its alcohol content. The most detailed list of contents that you will find marked on a bottle or can of beer at the local store will be there only as a sales gimmick -- as with the new Labatt's Sterling (2.5 grams carbs/glucides, 88 calories, 0.8 grams protein, 0.0 grams fat). But as it happens there can be a lot of things lurking in there, some of them quite odd.
"There 109 ingredients allowed in a bottle of beer in Canada," McKenna explains, adding that those ingredients that you find in a bottle of beer made by a large industrial brewer will always be longer than that found in the products of their artisanal "microbrewer" counterparts.
"A very common additive would be something like propylene glycol alginate (PGA), which is used in the food industry as a thickening agent to give enhanced viscosity to, well, cheap ice cream or whatever," he continues.
"With beer it gives you fake head -- long lasting head that's more resistant to detergent. Guinness uses it. It's like custard, custardy goo. The way to test for it is to take a finger-full of head and put it on your beer mat. If it's still there when you finish your beer, it's got PGA."
And there are more peculiar things afoot. The list of permissible additives to the brew you think is made from barley or wheat malt, hops, yeast and water includes hop oil, which contains sodium benzoate and, among others, pre- isomerized hop extract, caramel, dextrin, stabilizing agents, sequestering agents, preservatives, polyvinylpyrrolidone, dimethyl-polysiloxane, hydrogen peroxide, China clay, Nylon 66, and on a less sinister note, "Irish moss seaweed of the species Chondrus crispus." And also an odd simmered fish-gut by-product called isinglass.
"It's very effective at pulling protein out of beer," McKenna says. "But if you're a vegetarian or a vegan you're s--t out of luck."
Otherwise, generally speaking, what you don't know won't hurt you. Or in any case it hasn't since 1964, when the once-popular Quebec brewery Dow saw fit to top up its brew with a splash of cobalt sulphate, and in the process -- decades before Molson Dry -- became the beer with "no aftertaste" for 16 men who promptly succumbed to poisoning.
Whether or not they would have noticed or picked another brand or thought anything of it had cobalt sulphate been listed on the label is no longer relevant. But as a beer drinker, it would be nice to have a chance. They do in Germany, for example, where primary ingredients and allergens are listed on beer labels. They also do in the U.K., and will soon across the E.U., whose parliament McKenna lobbied for the legislation in 1998.
"Really what the U.K. is doing and the E.U. and the U.S. is contemplating is labelling priority allergens," says Carole Saindon, spokesperson for Health Canada, who says that we may soon do the same. For the fact is that listing everything that goes into a beer would simply be too cumbersome, and potentially misleading to boot.
"I come down on all sides of the issue," says Peter McAuslan, founder and CEO of McAuslan brewery of Montreal. "It could be a substantial list of ingredients, but if the consumer wants a list of what went in, fine. But when you put in ingredients x, y, z, it metabolizes. You don't put alcohol in. So it's not as straightforward as you might think. On the other hand, a big brewer that uses an artificial thickening agent will hide behind that argument to hide it."
As for me, decades of extensive testing of macro- and micro-brewery products has left me unconcerned about allergens. But the additives I can do without. And McAuslan's St-Ambroise Pale Ale, which as it happens is my preferred beer, is unpasteurized and has very few ingredients: wheat, malt, hops, yeast, water. So in the absence of labelling legislation, be advised that most micro-brewers are similarly disposed: nearer to a half-dozen ingredients than 109.
"The big breweries say all beer is good beer," says McKenna. "But some beer is better than others."
