The Bar Towel

Saw this in today's National Post,
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."

Gosh, Dow Ale.

One of my great-aunts used to drink that off the shelf (i.e. warm). My Dad would leave out a six pack for her on the kitchen table when she came over to babysit me. I look back on those memotries fondly...

Sorry, tangential material.

This article provides some examples of the worst additives. Anyone else want to add some examples of other, perhaps less noxious, materials? I used to add treacle to beers for sweetness/alcohol/body/colour, after I had had it in a winter beer in England, Werthered's Winter Royal, sadly no longer being produced.

-Uncle Bobby

Interesting that among the 109 permissible ingredients are things such as polyvinylpyrrolidone, dimethyl-polysilicone, hydrogen peroxide, China clay, and Nylon 66...but not whole cherries, apparently.

Personally, I stand 100% behind labelling of ingredients. What McAuslan said about fermentation byproducts (alcohol, etc.) is of no worry to me - those I know are fine...or at least should be.

When I moved to Canada from England I remember being taken by friends to a Brasserie in Montreal. There I saw an "additive" that surprised me but I learned was a common practice in many Quebecois establishments. The men sitting at their tables drinking glasses of beer by the tray would often pause to pour salt into their glass. I was told that it had something to do with preserving the head...I tried it once but never did it again.

Jon Walker wrote:When I moved to Canada from England I remember being taken by friends to a Brasserie in Montreal. There I saw an "additive" that surprised me but I learned was a common practice in many Quebecois establishments. The men sitting at their tables drinking glasses of beer by the tray would often pause to pour salt into their glass. I was told that it had something to do with preserving the head...

I have vague memories of some of my relatives in PEI doing the same thing, although I was too young to know exactly why they were doing it. I should ask my dad about it next time I talk to him.

Jon Walker wrote:When I moved to Canada from England I remember being taken by friends to a Brasserie in Montreal. There I saw an "additive" that surprised me but I learned was a common practice in many Quebecois establishments. The men sitting at their tables drinking glasses of beer by the tray would often pause to pour salt into their glass. I was told that it had something to do with preserving the head...

Tch, some people shouldn't be allowed to drink beer.

Adding salt to your beer actually flattens it. It's an old practice, now rarely seen, but the idea behind it was to de-carbonize your beer so that it would be less gaseous. Because the byproduct of getting CO2 out of your beer is the creation of foam on top of it, somewhere along the line it became known as a means of preserving the head rather than flattening the beer.

Steve Beaumont wrote:Adding salt to your beer actually flattens it. It's an old practice, now rarely seen, but the idea behind it was to de-carbonize your beer so that it would be less gaseous. Because the byproduct of getting CO2 out of your beer is the creation of foam on top of it, somewhere along the line it became known as a means of preserving the head rather than flattening the beer.

Learn something new everyday! Always wondered why anyone would add salt to their beer - now I know. I think Cass should apply to the government of Ontario for an educational grant of some kind. Certainly lots of useful (and of course not so useful ) information on this site.

I hate to date myself but for those of us over 50 who remember the men only rooms of old Toronto taverns, salt in your draft was a common practice and those of us who were underage at the time that the drinking age was 21 tried to emulate the experienced beer drinkers so we all put salt in our draft.

i'am not fifty just yet but we also used to salt draft beer why because the old timers did it thats why anybody remember 25 cent beers in the afternoon at the gasworks or the chimney in downtown to always came with a salt shaker

for me it was the Clinton Tavern in 1968 when the drinking age was 21 and I was 16....they'd let anyone in the place but the men's room (not washroom but the room in which women were not allowed as opposed to the Ladies and Escorts room where they were allowed even if many were professionals or, at the very least, lacking many of their most important teeth) was absolutely disgusting...but still a thrill for a 16 year old who absolutely hated the taste of beer...but man, I loved those pickled eggs...another reason for the salt on the table.