What's in your glass?
***Due to Blogger issues, the formatting and text of this post may look slightly off. I apologize for any eye strain it may cause.***
As reported by the BBC and other euro-centric news sources, an EU commission is debating whether or not to put ingredient [and possibly nutrition] information on alcoholic beverages.
I'd really like to see how far the commission takes this. I doubt brewers will be required to list things like isinglass [a clarifying agent made from the swimbladders of sturgeon] which are not part of the "finished" product, but as long as they list all the unnecessary chemicals like propylene glycol alginate u8 nhI'll be satisfied. Don't get me wrong, I realize we ingest strange chemicals everyday and I don't expect some synthesized algae extract to poison me [unless it metabolizes down to oxalic acid] but I like to know what I'm buying and putting into my body. [Click here for an interesting list of all the things C3H8O2 can be used for. Not only does it act as a "head stabilizer" for beer, you can use it as food-grade antifreeze.]
Don't get your hopes up about this type of labelling occuring in the U.S. any time soon. Bert Grant tried it in 1993 and got viciously smacked down by the BATF. When he protested the fuzzy wording and ambiguous regulations they "coincidentally" hit him with several investigations over the next few months which cost the company thousands of dollars, and probably took a few years off the man's life. Here's an excerpt, courtesy of HighBeam Research. [A great place to find old news articles]
In January 1993, a few months after Grant and his wife, Sherry, started putting nutritional information on six-pack cartons of the beer, David Dunbar, an inspector with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, visited their Yakima, Washington, brewery. Dunbar told them that Yakima Brewing & Malting is not allowed to inform consumers about the vitamins and minerals in a bottle of beer. This surprised the Grants, because neither the Federal Alcohol Administration Act nor the regulations issued under it address nutritional information. The regulations do, however, forbid false or misleading claims about "curative or therapeutic effects," and the BATF cited a 1954 regulatory interpretation that says "any reference to vitamin content in the advertising of malt beverages would mislead a substantial number of persons to believe that consumption of the product would produce curative or therapeutic effects."
The Grants had to stop using the Scottish Ale six-pack cartons and drop plans to put nutritional information on the packaging of their other beers. But the rule seemed silly to them. So Sherry Grant wrote a press release about the BATF's order and sent it to some trade journals. "We felt it should be brought out, because we wanted the law changed," Bert explains. The story eventually attracted attention from the mainstream press, including Playboy and radio commentator Charles Osgood, as well as industry publications. The coverage was sympathetic to the Grants and critical of the BATF. An editorial in the Vancouver Columbian, for example, called the BATF policy "hypocritical on its face" and argued that "more information, not less, is the way to encourage better choices."
"Then the coincidences started," Bert recalls. Dunbar, the BATF agent, came back several times to look at the Grants' records and grill the couple and their employees, spending a total of three weeks at the brewery. Sherry says Dunbar, who declines to comment on the case, had an intimidating, confrontational manner. "It scared me, because in the back of my mind, there was always this picture of Waco," she says. "And then I got really, really angry, because I thought, 'This is wrong. I should not have to be afraid of my own government."'
They don't want to mislead people into thinking that beer has any nutritional value? There's no nutritional value in most of the processed crap that Americans eat, and yet there's "nutrition info" on every candy wrapper and soda can in the land. I think the real issue is that the neo-prohibitionists would hate for people to find out that there's high levels of B vitamins and a good amount of protein in every bottle-conditioned beer. Come to think of it, I bet the "Big 3" don't want nutrition labels either. It would make it awful tough to keep spewing their BS about premium ingredients and processes if they had to actually tell customers what's in the can."Hmmm, I wonder which of these chemicals makes my beer taste 'colder'..."
Let's all be thankful we have such wise fathers looking out for us and making sure we don't get "edumacated" by our bottles of beer.