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.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…