It's annoying that the title and summary alone tell me nothing, without additional information about 1) how sensitive are these tests, and 2) what concentration is medically significant.
The missing sentence could be, "That's because modern detection methods are now so amazingly accurate that they can detect insignificant quantities of chemicals."
Or it could be, "Therefore, if you drink beer you will be poisoned and die a horrible death."
Or maybe it's just, "Start worrying, and we'll figure out if it means anything later."
I wonder how much of this is just a map of PFAS contamination in general though… is the beer aspect of this notable, or would we see the same for drinking water?
PFAS was used in a lot of different things, the sources of major contamination are military bases and manufacturing plants, but it was used in a wide array of consumer products so there is some level of contamination almost everywhere.
It looks like PFAS is a bigger problem in red states (Republican-voting states, for those outside the US). I suspect it's due to the prevalence of fossil fuel extraction and refining facilities and military bases in those states.
Brewers are supposed to have really good filtration FWIW. [1] If particles are showing up in beer then something has gone horribly wrong as in, someone is being incredibly cheap. [2]
I couldn’t find mention of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’ anywhere on the first link(it may just be a little out of date concerning the last few years of development.
The second link didn’t show any mention of a beer brewing link, but was specifically addressing ‘forever chemicals’ that are meaningfully on topic.
Unfortunately they also included this caveat:
“Although some of the filters did not achieve 100 percent reduction in PFAS measured in the water samples, they did eliminate 100 percent of PFOA and PFOS, two of the most notorious forever chemicals.”
I am not. The level of filtration required to remove chemicals is simple. It's a cost, but that cost can be moved to the customers and the beer can be promoted as "The Only Safe MicroBrew In {insert_state}". Artesian waters are a massive money maker. Apply the same sales logic to the beer. If anything I would taunt all the other micro-brewers and laugh all the way to the bank.
I gather even artesian wells can contain these chemicals, which get pretty much everywhere.
On the other hand, based on the article you linked to, if something like a Berkey filter is sufficient (I have doubts about their testing, but whatever) the cost is probably not prohibitive. Assuming there's something as effective as a Berkey which can handle a more practical flow of water, but at the same cost per volume of water handled.
Some places with weird water profiles will set up RO systems and add minerals to build a water profile on top of that, but it's far from the norm. People decide based on how their municipal water supply works with the kind of beers they want to make. I've seen a few brewhouses in the process of being built and talked to some commercial brewers about water, and depending on the location some places just use municipal water. New York water has a great profile for beer.
This isn't correct in the general case. In the specific case of brewing, if you're filtering at all it makes sense to use an RO system so that you can then do mineral adjustments from the RO base water.I'm not aware of any brewers outside of homebrewing using charcoal filtration.
Activated carbon will remove the larger chain PFAs, but is not as effective as removing the smaller ones. From the paper:
> Conventional water treatment employed at municipal
drinking water treatment plants have been shown to be nearly
ineffective at removing PFAS. This can leave the burden
and cost of implementing more sophisticated water treatments
to brewers unless public water suppliers implement tertiary
treatment to remove PFAS from finished water prior to
distribution. Anion exchange and activated carbon treatments
have been shown to more effectively remove longer-chain
PFAS and PFSAs but were less effective in removing PFCAS
and the alternative shorter-chain PFAS and PFECAs.
Reverse osmosis treatment showed significant removal of
PFAS of different chain lengths in drinking water, but can be
prohibitive due to high operational costs and energy usage.
In areas with known contamination, beers from macro-
breweries were less likely to have detectable PFAS than craft
beers brewed at a smaller scale, potentially due to more
effective and expensive filtration of tap water at larger
breweries.
"The test subjects were produced by U.S. brewers in areas with documented water system contamination, plus popular domestic and international beers from larger companies with unknown water sources."
"Average ∑PFAS concentrations of Criteria 3 and 4 beers (popular national and international beers) were similar to the average ∑PFAS concentrations of many Criteria 1 and 2 beer"
This is troubling, but what it people had been forced to actually scrub their pans, or occasionally get wet in the rain? Those outcomes would truly be unbearable, and we can't let the march of progress by stymied by a few minor problems.
go ahead and pretend the decision is that obvious and easy to make, but the reality was that the market offered a product that performed better (non-stick pans), and people flocked to it because of a shared negative experience in the kitchen.
We didn't rationally trade health for convenience, few people recognized any kind of trade-off was even occurring.
We're killing ourselves just so we can slightly more comfortable. It's the dumbest thing in the world. People are pouring gallons of neurotoxins on their lawns so they aren't faced with observing multiple kinds of grass, or god forbid, weeds. The market may be filling people's desires, but people's desires are terrible and should often be ignored. People have a desire to be bored less often, and now we're cursed with smart phones and social media. Call me a luddite if you want, but make sure not to drink your water or your local beer.
If you're going to worry about beer, worry about the alcohol, which is unquestionably toxic and carcinogenic.
This study is almost like an intentional parody of people who miss the forest for the trees: "lead poisoning a leading cause of death in gunshot victims!"
Also liver damage has got to be one of the worst lived experiences that exists. And alcohol seems to slowly accumulate that damage over time. After seeing the end state with my grandparents and experiencing the end state with a viral infection I decided that alcohol just isn't worth it. It's not that good of an experience compared to alternatives to justify that awfulness.
Don't misunderstand me: I enjoy a drink now and again, but it's obviously silly to be obsessing about PFAS in beer when the alcohol is the definitive risk to your health, with a double underscore.
That said, as long as you aren't consuming regularly in excess, even the alcohol isn't going to affect your lifespan. It just goes to illustrate the relative levels of absurdity involved here.
Or.. drink enough of it until you forget that you were worried in the first place.
I feel it's needless to say that's not actual advice.. but well, better safe than sorry lol.
EDIT: I mean, of all the health reasons not to drink beer.. PFAS is _probably_ not the main one to worry about? I'm not a doctor, but it seems there's already enough known adverse effects that this additional piece of information is probably not a dealbreaker for those who drink?
> Researchers tested 23 different beers from across the U.S. and found that 95% contained PFAS
23 beers across the 10,000+ breweries in the US? Ok, lets find out more
> By modifying a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) testing method for analyzing levels of PFAS in drinking water, Hoponick Redmon and colleagues tested 23 beers. The test subjects were produced by U.S. brewers in areas with documented water system contamination, plus popular domestic and international beers from larger companies with unknown water sources.
So, 95% of the beer they tested from a few known water-contaminated locales had PFAS, but I don't think 95% of the beer produced in the US is brewed in such places. Yeah, it makes sense that garbage water in = garbage beer out (this tracks with non-PFSA issues too)
I think people will miss the true headline. That we have let private corporations destroy our water supply with chemicals. This obviously isn’t exclusive to beer either.
Leaded gas was never fine. GM avoided using the word lead about their tetraethyllead product because everyone knew lead was problematic. Lies and lobbying assured that they knowingly could go ahead and poison the whole world.
Wikipedia has a history of how lead was known to cause problems, dating back to antiquity. Some excerpts:
> Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived in the 1st century AD, wrote that lead makes the mind "give way".[121][274]
> Lead poisoning from rum was also noted in Boston.[291] Benjamin Franklin suspected lead to be a risk in 1786
> The first legislation in the UK to limit pottery workers' exposure to lead was included in the Factories Act Extension Act in 1864, with further introduced in 1899. William James Furnival (1853–1928), research ceramist of City & Guilds London Institute, appeared before Parliament in 1901 and presented a decade's evidence to convince the nation's leaders to remove lead completely from the British ceramic industry.
I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?
> I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?
No. We have observational data in humans (which is problematic for drawing conclusions, since PFAS contamination tends to correlate with industry and population), and animal models, mostly in non-mammalian species.
As you correctly note, lead was known to be toxic since long before leaded gasoline -- the "question" was more about the delivery mechanism (auto exhaust) than the toxicity of the element itself.
It was pretty obvious from the get-go that leaded gas was an absolutely horrible idea, but this was before the mass-media age, so people didn't know that people who worked at the tetraethyl lead plant were going mad so often that it became known as the "looney gas building".[0]
Doses make the poisons, and apparently the dose for some of these chemicals is much, much higher than tetraethyl lead.
Also, apparently the molecular diagram for TEL sorta looks like a hackenkreuz. How appropriate.
I'm all for safety and health at a reasonable cost, but yeah, seems like it doesn't matter how good things are. We gotta have something to worry about.
If you are seriously worried about PFAS in your beer, go to the ACS Journal article - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265 - which is pretty readable. That will give you some good ideas of which breweries might best be avoided for now.
> The researchers found a strong correlation between PFAS concentrations in municipal drinking water and levels in locally brewed beer -- a phenomenon that Hoponick Redmon and colleagues say has not yet been studied in U.S. retail beer. They found PFAS in 95% of the beers they tested.
(Being in the tap water, I'd figure it's also in locally-bottled water and soft drinks and such.)
FWIW - all the study's authors are with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTI_International They officially claimed no conflicts of interest. But if they're drinking local beers anywhere near RTI's HQ - yeah, ample reason to want things fixed.
I agree, but if I were setting up a brewery in Coastal North Carolina, I'd invest in an RO system, the water is known to be all kinds of bad in the area. I have some relatives in the area and their town had to install a municipal RO system because they were facing law suits, however not everywhere in the region has done so.
It's annoying that the title and summary alone tell me nothing, without additional information about 1) how sensitive are these tests, and 2) what concentration is medically significant.
The missing sentence could be, "That's because modern detection methods are now so amazingly accurate that they can detect insignificant quantities of chemicals."
Or it could be, "Therefore, if you drink beer you will be poisoned and die a horrible death."
Or maybe it's just, "Start worrying, and we'll figure out if it means anything later."
Reminds me of the completely vacuous headlines in financial media.
"Stock x went up yesterday and then went down"
In the twitter world, media is like junk-food. Mostly empty calories, soundbites, and memes.
Here's the map. Drink responsibly!
https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/image...
I wonder how much of this is just a map of PFAS contamination in general though… is the beer aspect of this notable, or would we see the same for drinking water?
It's good to be on the west side, I guess. Seriously, what's the source of the PFAS/PFOS contamination? Chemical plants?
PFAS was used in a lot of different things, the sources of major contamination are military bases and manufacturing plants, but it was used in a wide array of consumer products so there is some level of contamination almost everywhere.
In Minnesota, it’s almost certainly 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing).
This looks a lot like one of those heat maps that correlates almost exactly to population.
Are we looking at the same map? The PFAS contamination truly does not follow population.
Yeah it only looks like a population heat map if you include the blue dots. The pink/red shaded areas definitely do not follow population patterns.
It looks like PFAS is a bigger problem in red states (Republican-voting states, for those outside the US). I suspect it's due to the prevalence of fossil fuel extraction and refining facilities and military bases in those states.
Vermont is in the clear.
Beers were only tested in areas with bad water quality.
And by "95%" they mean 22 out of 23 beers tested.
And these areas are exactly the most densely populated:
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
Brewers are supposed to have really good filtration FWIW. [1] If particles are showing up in beer then something has gone horribly wrong as in, someone is being incredibly cheap. [2]
[1] - https://www.beer-brewing.com/beer_brewing/beer_brewing_water...
[2] - https://www.ewg.org/research/getting-forever-chemicals-out-d...
Which of the filtration methods on that list do you believe should be capable of filtering PFAS, the "forever chemicals" in question?
I linked them.
I read through both of the links posted.
I couldn’t find mention of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’ anywhere on the first link(it may just be a little out of date concerning the last few years of development.
The second link didn’t show any mention of a beer brewing link, but was specifically addressing ‘forever chemicals’ that are meaningfully on topic.
Unfortunately they also included this caveat:
“Although some of the filters did not achieve 100 percent reduction in PFAS measured in the water samples, they did eliminate 100 percent of PFOA and PFOS, two of the most notorious forever chemicals.”
PFAS may be ending up in the product from the processing equipment, not necessarily only from the water source.
in a microbrewery? You are kidding.
in a microbrewery? You are kidding.
I am not. The level of filtration required to remove chemicals is simple. It's a cost, but that cost can be moved to the customers and the beer can be promoted as "The Only Safe MicroBrew In {insert_state}". Artesian waters are a massive money maker. Apply the same sales logic to the beer. If anything I would taunt all the other micro-brewers and laugh all the way to the bank.
I gather even artesian wells can contain these chemicals, which get pretty much everywhere.
On the other hand, based on the article you linked to, if something like a Berkey filter is sufficient (I have doubts about their testing, but whatever) the cost is probably not prohibitive. Assuming there's something as effective as a Berkey which can handle a more practical flow of water, but at the same cost per volume of water handled.
Some places with weird water profiles will set up RO systems and add minerals to build a water profile on top of that, but it's far from the norm. People decide based on how their municipal water supply works with the kind of beers they want to make. I've seen a few brewhouses in the process of being built and talked to some commercial brewers about water, and depending on the location some places just use municipal water. New York water has a great profile for beer.
You don't need reverse osmosis to filter out PFAS -- activated carbon will do it.
This isn't correct in the general case. In the specific case of brewing, if you're filtering at all it makes sense to use an RO system so that you can then do mineral adjustments from the RO base water.I'm not aware of any brewers outside of homebrewing using charcoal filtration.
Activated carbon will remove the larger chain PFAs, but is not as effective as removing the smaller ones. From the paper:
> Conventional water treatment employed at municipal drinking water treatment plants have been shown to be nearly ineffective at removing PFAS. This can leave the burden and cost of implementing more sophisticated water treatments to brewers unless public water suppliers implement tertiary treatment to remove PFAS from finished water prior to distribution. Anion exchange and activated carbon treatments have been shown to more effectively remove longer-chain PFAS and PFSAs but were less effective in removing PFCAS and the alternative shorter-chain PFAS and PFECAs. Reverse osmosis treatment showed significant removal of PFAS of different chain lengths in drinking water, but can be prohibitive due to high operational costs and energy usage. In areas with known contamination, beers from macro- breweries were less likely to have detectable PFAS than craft beers brewed at a smaller scale, potentially due to more effective and expensive filtration of tap water at larger breweries.
There is a reason literally no beer maker does this. Hard to promote beer on health factors when it is already a literal poison...
"The test subjects were produced by U.S. brewers in areas with documented water system contamination, plus popular domestic and international beers from larger companies with unknown water sources."
"Average ∑PFAS concentrations of Criteria 3 and 4 beers (popular national and international beers) were similar to the average ∑PFAS concentrations of many Criteria 1 and 2 beer"
A link to the source of the information can be found in TFA https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265
The study https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265
This is troubling, but what it people had been forced to actually scrub their pans, or occasionally get wet in the rain? Those outcomes would truly be unbearable, and we can't let the march of progress by stymied by a few minor problems.
go ahead and pretend the decision is that obvious and easy to make, but the reality was that the market offered a product that performed better (non-stick pans), and people flocked to it because of a shared negative experience in the kitchen.
We didn't rationally trade health for convenience, few people recognized any kind of trade-off was even occurring.
We're killing ourselves just so we can slightly more comfortable. It's the dumbest thing in the world. People are pouring gallons of neurotoxins on their lawns so they aren't faced with observing multiple kinds of grass, or god forbid, weeds. The market may be filling people's desires, but people's desires are terrible and should often be ignored. People have a desire to be bored less often, and now we're cursed with smart phones and social media. Call me a luddite if you want, but make sure not to drink your water or your local beer.
Way to ruin my Friday. Sigh. Now, I can’t even drink to forget society’s ills.
If you're going to worry about beer, worry about the alcohol, which is unquestionably toxic and carcinogenic.
This study is almost like an intentional parody of people who miss the forest for the trees: "lead poisoning a leading cause of death in gunshot victims!"
Also liver damage has got to be one of the worst lived experiences that exists. And alcohol seems to slowly accumulate that damage over time. After seeing the end state with my grandparents and experiencing the end state with a viral infection I decided that alcohol just isn't worth it. It's not that good of an experience compared to alternatives to justify that awfulness.
Don't misunderstand me: I enjoy a drink now and again, but it's obviously silly to be obsessing about PFAS in beer when the alcohol is the definitive risk to your health, with a double underscore.
That said, as long as you aren't consuming regularly in excess, even the alcohol isn't going to affect your lifespan. It just goes to illustrate the relative levels of absurdity involved here.
What sorts of alternatives are you comparing to, if I might ask? (I personally find cannabis very different than alcohol in lots of ways)
You still can, just don't drink beer made in US plague states.
Here's the study map: https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265/asset/image...
And here's the 2024 presidential election map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/El...
Or.. drink enough of it until you forget that you were worried in the first place.
I feel it's needless to say that's not actual advice.. but well, better safe than sorry lol.
EDIT: I mean, of all the health reasons not to drink beer.. PFAS is _probably_ not the main one to worry about? I'm not a doctor, but it seems there's already enough known adverse effects that this additional piece of information is probably not a dealbreaker for those who drink?
Now do the crime map!
The title was scary until I saw:
> Researchers tested 23 different beers from across the U.S. and found that 95% contained PFAS
23 beers across the 10,000+ breweries in the US? Ok, lets find out more
> By modifying a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) testing method for analyzing levels of PFAS in drinking water, Hoponick Redmon and colleagues tested 23 beers. The test subjects were produced by U.S. brewers in areas with documented water system contamination, plus popular domestic and international beers from larger companies with unknown water sources.
So, 95% of the beer they tested from a few known water-contaminated locales had PFAS, but I don't think 95% of the beer produced in the US is brewed in such places. Yeah, it makes sense that garbage water in = garbage beer out (this tracks with non-PFSA issues too)
I think people will miss the true headline. That we have let private corporations destroy our water supply with chemicals. This obviously isn’t exclusive to beer either.
If everyone is consuming these chemicals, maybe they're not so bad.
It's not a problem until it's a problem and then it's too late to do anything, the default stance should be to worry, not to let it pass.
Leaded gas was fine for a looong time, and as an individual you can't really tell it's bad, once you zoom out and look at statistics it's not that good: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-tie...
Leaded gas was never fine. GM avoided using the word lead about their tetraethyllead product because everyone knew lead was problematic. Lies and lobbying assured that they knowingly could go ahead and poison the whole world.
Wikipedia has a history of how lead was known to cause problems, dating back to antiquity. Some excerpts:
> Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived in the 1st century AD, wrote that lead makes the mind "give way".[121][274]
> Lead poisoning from rum was also noted in Boston.[291] Benjamin Franklin suspected lead to be a risk in 1786
> The first legislation in the UK to limit pottery workers' exposure to lead was included in the Factories Act Extension Act in 1864, with further introduced in 1899. William James Furnival (1853–1928), research ceramist of City & Guilds London Institute, appeared before Parliament in 1901 and presented a decade's evidence to convince the nation's leaders to remove lead completely from the British ceramic industry.
I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?
> I don't know much about forever chemicals. Is there the same level of evidence as we had for lead?
No. We have observational data in humans (which is problematic for drawing conclusions, since PFAS contamination tends to correlate with industry and population), and animal models, mostly in non-mammalian species.
As you correctly note, lead was known to be toxic since long before leaded gasoline -- the "question" was more about the delivery mechanism (auto exhaust) than the toxicity of the element itself.
It was pretty obvious from the get-go that leaded gas was an absolutely horrible idea, but this was before the mass-media age, so people didn't know that people who worked at the tetraethyl lead plant were going mad so often that it became known as the "looney gas building".[0]
Doses make the poisons, and apparently the dose for some of these chemicals is much, much higher than tetraethyl lead.
Also, apparently the molecular diagram for TEL sorta looks like a hackenkreuz. How appropriate.
[0]https://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-...
I'm all for safety and health at a reasonable cost, but yeah, seems like it doesn't matter how good things are. We gotta have something to worry about.
Infertility is reasonably linked to this.
What about the other 5%? Have they really found a way to get rid of PFAS???
Is it more or less dangerous than the alcohol?
Alcohol: mouth and throat, laryngeal, esophageal, female breast, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancer.
PFAS: testicular cancer...
Nope to PFAS!
If you are seriously worried about PFAS in your beer, go to the ACS Journal article - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c11265 - which is pretty readable. That will give you some good ideas of which breweries might best be avoided for now.
> The researchers found a strong correlation between PFAS concentrations in municipal drinking water and levels in locally brewed beer -- a phenomenon that Hoponick Redmon and colleagues say has not yet been studied in U.S. retail beer. They found PFAS in 95% of the beers they tested.
(Being in the tap water, I'd figure it's also in locally-bottled water and soft drinks and such.)
FWIW - all the study's authors are with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTI_International They officially claimed no conflicts of interest. But if they're drinking local beers anywhere near RTI's HQ - yeah, ample reason to want things fixed.
beer brewers cannot be held responsible for municipal water issues.
I agree, but if I were setting up a brewery in Coastal North Carolina, I'd invest in an RO system, the water is known to be all kinds of bad in the area. I have some relatives in the area and their town had to install a municipal RO system because they were facing law suits, however not everywhere in the region has done so.
Using a well-maintained pH-remineralized RO system isn't exactly rocket science. In this day and age, it is a basic expectation.
[flagged]
A new study will come out with PFAS showing in every product. Check out the contamination areas:
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
Or something like "Drinking One Beer a Day Can Extend Your Life by 30 Years"