ASBC HANDBOOK SERIES ASBC HANDBOOK SERIES Practical Guides for Beer Quality
Practical Guides for Beer Quality
BEER SAFETY and
WHOLESOMENESS
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Charles W. Bamforth
Beer: The Best of Drinks
Chapter
It is hard to imagine, I know, but Starbucks has only been around since March 31, 1971. Indeed coffee, generally, as a beverage can be traced back to as recently as the mid-15th century in Yemen. Tea, by contrast, has been enjoyed for more than 5,000 years from the days of Chinese Emperor Shen Nung. Beer, however, has delighted drinkers for perhaps 8,000 years or longer. What is more, beer is as much a food as it is a beverage. The Germans have long since called it “liquid bread,� an entirely logical term insofar as the earliest brewing technologies in ancient Sumeria involved the baking of a bread prior to its fermentation into alcohol. Despite there being several types of molecules in both tea and coffee that impact the human body, not least caffeine, one would not turn to those drinks for any meaningful contribution to the diet. With beer, however, there is significant nutritional value. On the ships of the great 18th century British navigator Captain James Cook, beer is said to have contributed as many calories to the seafarers’ diet as meat and biscuits combined (Bamforth, 2002). There are claims about Trappist monks surviving Lent on beer alone. We also remember the well-publicized case in 2019 of an Ohioan who survived on a beer-only diet for 40 days (and lost 25 pounds for his pain). However, I would contend that an exclusively beer lifestyle is not 1
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Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
the way to go. Having said that, I contend that neither is a curry-only diet. Or a fruit-only diet. Or a sausage-only diet. Even so, a beer-only route would certainly be more sensible than a wine-only or a spirits-only program. The reason is that beer has more nutritive value than other alcoholic beverages. I will have more to say about that later. Let us just say that, in my opinion, beer is better suited to a balanced diet than is any other beverage. For the longest time, beer occupied an indispensable place on the household dining table. Before microbiological research established that water could harbor pathogenic organisms, people realized through simple trial and error that drinking water could lead to sickness and death, whereas drinking beer did not. The most famous example of this truth came in 1854. A public water pump on London’s Broad Street was contaminated with the bacterium that causes cholera. Numerous people died. Doctor John Snow traced the outbreak to this pump but found that workers at a nearby brewery did not fall sick. They were quaffing the company’s products and not the water that other people were using to slake their thirst. He concluded that the beer was safer to drink than the water (Fig. 1-1). Of course, it was quickly realized that the boiling stage that formed a part of the brewing process was responsible for destroying pathogenic organisms. And of course, we know today that the alcohol, bitter substances, low pH, and perhaps polyphenols in beer prevent the growth of pathogens.* We see, then, that at least two reasons explain why ale found its way routinely onto the dining table in homes through the ages: It was safer to drink than water, and it also was of nutritive value. Even the children drank beer—“small beer,” lower-alcohol products made by fermenting either the last (weaker) runnings of wort or worts made by mashing of spent grains. Of course, there would also have been the sheer hedonic satisfaction associated with quaffing beer as opposed to water. As recently as the 1930s, there was only encouragement from the British government when the trade organization The Brewers Society (now known as the British Beer & Pub Association) distributed a series * It should be noted that alcohol-free and very low alcohol beers may not be immune to the growth and survival of pathogenic bacteria (see Menz et al. [2011] in Further Reading).
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Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
Fig. 1-1. John Snow memorial and pub in London. (Courtesy Justinc— Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)
of posters with a “Beer Is Best” theme (Fig. 1-2). The campaign ran over several decades in the first half of the 20th century. It is rather a different world these days. Beer and other alcoholic drinks are certainly not championed by governments. For an example 3
Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
Fig. 1-2. Examples of posters and ads from a 1900s promotional campaign by The Brewers Society. (Courtesy British Beer & Pub Association—Reproduced by permission)
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of this, we might turn to the United Kingdom, where there has been a radical change in attitude. In the mid-1990s, the Department of Health actually increased the number of units of alcohol in its recommended limits for safe consumption. (One unit of alcohol is defined as 10 mL, or 8 g, of pure alcohol.) For men, the increase was from 21 units to 28 units per week, and for women, the increase was from 14 units to 21 units per week. The recommendation was no more than 4 units per day. One assumes that this alteration was based on the abundance of scientific and medical data that had emerged over the years showing that some benefits are to be derived from consuming alcohol in moderation, not simply those associated with pleasure. Compare and contrast this with what happened in 2016, when the U.K. government issued new guidelines. The recommended maximum intake for both men and women was lowered to 14 units per week. I fear that Dame Sally Davies (England’s Chief Medical Officer who moved on to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 2019) was somewhat selective in the research that she quoted. She went so far as to state that the research on moderate alcohol consumption cutting down the risk of coronary heart disease was “an old wives’ tale.” I will address issues to do with beer consumption and health in Chapters 6 through 8. Here, let me just highlight one example of how data can be interpreted. In 2018 in The Lancet, Professor Emmanuela Gakidou of the University of Washington, Seattle, and multiple colleagues (Griswold et al., 2016) drew the stark conclusion from a global study of the impact of alcohol on health that “the level of consumption that minimizes health loss is zero.” In other words, she said that the safest option is to abstain. All of this was very alarming. Fortunately, there are learned and fair-minded individuals who can interpret the data dispassionately and with reason. Enter Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. He openly criticized how the data had been interpreted, and he credited The Lancet for responding to this criticism as follows (Spiegelhalter, 2018):
Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
Specifically, comparing no drinks with one drink a day the risk of developing one of the 23 alcohol-related health problems was 0.5% higher—meaning 914 in 100,000 15–95 year olds would develop 5
Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
a condition in one year if they did not drink, but 918 people in 100,000 who drank one alcoholic drink a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem in a year. This increased to 7% in people who drank two drinks a day (for one year, 977 people in 100,000 who drank two alcoholic drinks a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem) and 37% in people who drank five drinks every day (for one year, 1,252 people in 100,000 who drank five alcoholic drinks a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem). Spiegelhalter put it in layperson’s terms, using gin rather than beer as an example. If 25,000 people drank 400,000 bottles of gin (750 mL), equally divided, then just one of those people would develop a health problem owing to the alcohol. He also observed that the government might be mindful of the fact that there is no safe level of driving either but that they don’t issue edicts about how much driving people should do. “Come to think of it,” said Spiegelhalter (2008), “there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.” And he also opined that drinking the recommended maximum amount of alcohol is less dangerous than “an hour of television watching each day, or a bacon sandwich a couple of times a week.” I will address the issue of statistics and the drawing of correlations in Chapter 6. And let me say at the outset that I am very much in favor of moderation in all things, including alcohol consumption. This, of course, is the final volume of a series on beer quality and its control and troubleshooting. It is my opinion that we cannot divorce the matter of health and wholesomeness from the quality scenario. An unhealthy product certainly fails the quality stakes, while a potentially healthful beer equally justifies a claim for meeting customer expectation and delight. However, I will particularly emphasize the issues that are controllable by brewers, irrespective of the scale on which they are brewing, without dwelling excessively on the minutiae of medical research in the context of beer. I will not ignore the latter but instead refer readers to the additional reading materials cited at the end of the book, should they seek to delve deeper. Discussing the whole matter of alcoholic beverages in the context of health—particularly claims for benefits—is suffused with challenges. This is particularly the case when the author is perceived as
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Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
Fig. 1-3. Caricature of Sir Edgar Vincent, later known as Lord D’Abernon. (Published in Vanity Fair, April 20, 1899)
being within the industry and therefore straightway dismissed as being prejudiced. Such an author is equally as often criticized by some from within the industry, who perceive his message of “drink in moderation” as conflicting with corporate goals of selling six-packs. I plead that my simple goal is to highlight without prejudice the current understanding of beer consumption in connection with health and wholesomeness. Whoever does this and from whatever viewpoint is in a difficult place. Remember that strong financial lobbies with diverse priorities and intent are bankrolling the naysayers. It was Lord D’Abernon who, in 1918, chaired an advisory committee on alcohol for the British Medical Research Council (Fig. 1-3). The committee was established “to separate what is knowledge from what is surmise, conjecture, or popular belief, and, by this preliminary clarifying of the question, to prepare the way for further research” (Roueche, 1960a). In the book that emerged from the committee’s work, entitled Alcohol: Its Action on the Human Organism, which was republished more recently (Central Control Board, 2015), Lord D’Abernon wrote the following: Alcohol is an ungrateful subject. Most people who are interested in the subject are already partisans on the one side or the other, and no body of impartial opinion exists which is ready to be 7
Chapter 1 Beer: The Best of Drinks
guided by scientific inquiry. The majority of those who would give any attention to original work on the subject would do so less to gain knowledge than to find arms and argument to support their preconceived opinion. In 1957, Chauncey D. Leake, professor of medicine at The Ohio State University, spoke at a symposium on alcoholism under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Roueche, 1960b). He said: As better knowledge and understanding of the action of alcohol becomes available, more sensible attitudes regarding it are arising, [but] it is also interesting to observe how little the people wanted to learn about alcohol in a scientific way. They seemed much to prefer their violently differing emotional fantasies about it. Regard this book as an attempt to bring reason to the discussion of beer in respect of both its potential benefits and the problems that may arise from its use. View this book like the others in the series: as an aide to practicing brewers that will help ensure that their products are safe and wholesome. We will start with the negative.
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