What's brewing? The rise of organic beer

Picture a summer’s day, the horizon undulating in the haze of the heat as you raise a pint of refreshing pesticides to your lips. Cheers. Yes, pesticides. In a bottle, in a glass. That’s beer – or at least that’s probably part of your beer if you are drinking many of the commercial, mass-produced liquids born of chemical agribusiness.

Beer, lager and ale are made by extracting sugars from barley malt and other cereals. The sweet liquid this produces is then fermented with yeast, which converts the sugars into alcohol. A 2002 report published by the British Beer and Pubs Association and Brewing Research International, showed 23 organofluorine pesticides approved for use on malting barley in the UK. One of these is the fungicide quinoxyfen, which, when tested in the 1990s in varied dosages on beagles, mice, rats and rabbits produced, among other side effects, increased cholesterol, kidney and liver weights, loss of appetite and anaemia. The Pesticides Safety Directorate’s 2004 report into pesticide residues in beer found traces of 30 different pesticides across 45 samples.

Aside from the potential of swigging a chemical or two, mass-produced beer just doesn’t taste as good...

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