A New Study Found Forever Chemicals in Beer

When you’re selecting a beer, what qualities do you look for? It might be a certain style; it could be specific hops or a specific approach to brewing. Odds are pretty good, however, that you’re not opting for a pint, can or bottle in the hopes that you’ll ingest some sort of unwanted chemical. Unfortunately, the results of a new study suggest that that could be an unwanted ingredient in more beers than you’d hope.

In April, the journal Environmental Science & Technology published a study that looked into the presence of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in a number of domestic beers. In a field that abounds with relatively dry — no pun intended — paper titles, this one took a different approach: “Hold My Beer: The Linkage between Municipal Water and Brewing Location on PFAS in Popular Beverages.”

The paper’s title has a wry sense of humor, but the paper’s findings are more concerning. The authors point out early in the paper that “approximately 18% of U.S. breweries are located within zip codes with detectable PFAS in municipal drinking water” — and that they hope that their findings can be of use to both policymakers and brewers.

Writing at The Guardian, Tom Perkins has more details about the study — including that the vast majority of the 23 beers the researchers evaluated had forever chemicals in them.

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That said, the researchers don’t recommend eliminating beer from your diet. “If you want to still enjoy happy hour, then I think you should,” one of the study’s authors, Jennifer Hoponick Redmon, told Perkins. The Guardian also noted that forever chemicals used in firefighting played a part here, in that — in Perkins’s phrasing — “firefighting foam pollution hot spots” led to higher levels of forever chemicals in beer made nearby.

We’re living through a point in time when awareness of forever chemicals — and their potential effects — is on the rise. Hopefully this paper will have the desired effect and can lead to safer beer for us all.