Beer (and other alcoholic beverages) are not food and are not required to have ingredient labels. They must list the percentage of alcohol, and they must have the warning about alcohol. They cannot make any claims about nutrition or health benefits.
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One person checks the label of ever type of beer sold in the US? That is not big government.
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Thatās all great information, but itās not an ingredients list, and itās not a requirement.
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I donāt care if it is food, beer, glue, or paint thinner, it SHOULD have ingredients list. Ideally with every single molecule/CAS-number that is involved.
(I just took a look at a bottle of a local beer (Europe context) and it HAS components, but they say next to nothing (water, barley malt, hops products), even more useless than cleaning stuff ("<5% anionactive tensides", while the molecule list would be better for finding possible alternative uses in the lab). Grumble. But back to the beer, if it would have hemp involved, it would have to be listed.)
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Another BoingBoing over-reaction to a non-issue. Have you seen the wild variety and creativity of beer labels? This trumped-up story makes it sound like the shelves are full of nothing but white labels with āBEERā printed on them. Nothing is further from the truth. Beer is a consumable and the label has to meet certain standards and not mis-lead consumers.
Every actual brewer Iāve read reacting to this story has had the exact opposite experience with Battle. They say heās fair and easy to do business with.
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Itād be nice, but people will freak out when they see isinglass on the ingredients list. Itās a clarifying agent (used instead of filtering) that happens to be made out of fish bladders.
More importantly, the big boys would fight tooth and nail to keep from having to admit that their beers use rice, corn, and other adjunct grains (they lighten the body, but theyāre also cheaper than barley).
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The best comment on the article was from vita64 - āItās addled Battleās bottle battle.ā
Try reading Fox in Socks after a few beers, all while maintaining that 20 labels/hour approval rate, (spoilers) no wonder Knox loses it at the end.
Also instead of nutcase, perhaps Mr. Martin is thorough and following a dense set of regulations (at least Title 27 Chapter I Subchapter A Part 7 subpart C, Ā§Ā§7.20 through 7.29) , as suggested in the articleā¦
This trumped-up story makes it sound like the shelves are full of nothing but white labels with āBEERā printed on them.
And whatās wrong with that?
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All of us.
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Where do you live?
Here in America, allergens are often unlabelled.
Nothing like having an allergic reaction, and trying to cross-check the ingredients lists of what could have caused this and what hasnāt caused reactions, and knowing the ingredients lists arenāt complete, and the pesticides arenāt listed.
Nothing like trying to research allergies and cross-reactivity to identify allergens, but getting stymied by paywalls and by the fact that most articles mentioning Benedryl are about using it to treat allergies, not about how it can trigger allergies and why.
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St. Georgeās absinthe infamously went through a deeply frustrating process trying to get their label approved.
The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didnāt like the monkey.
āI had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,ā Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label āimplied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualitiesā to the product.āI said, āYou get all that just from looking at a monkey?āā
The story you get when you visit the distillery varies a bit depending on whoās telling it, but Iāve heard Lance say that one of their objections to the monkey drumming on the skull was that you werenāt allowed to depict animals engaging in āunnatural animal behavior.ā So naturally, the label they ultimately approved hadā¦ a monkey playing a cowbell. Which is why thereās a cowbell hanging in their tasting room.
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Count me in the group of people who think that this is a non-issue, of concern mostly to a handful of craft brewers who canāt let go of a grudge. I could very easily see BB having done the opposite article, say taking the Weed Beer brewers to task for implying that their brew had THC in it and someone angrily wondering what the bureaucrat in charge of approving labels (30,000 a year!) was doing to earn his gummint paycheck.
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i like this guy. works hard, loves his job. could have gotten boxed in by a bureaucracy and turned into a robot. instead, heās a real person, idiosyncrasies and all. heās on my list of people-to-have-a-beer-with.
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I canāt say Iāvr made 30,000 decisions about anything ever. Except maybe pants, and thatās usually, ānot on this day!ā
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So what. People should have the option to face the full truth of what they eat/drink. I would go as far to say it should not be an option to not know it - though iād consider it just enough if they had to spend the same effort to not know as they now have to spend to know.
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If it was on me, artwork is a free unregulated game (though no untrue textual claims!), and ingredients listed have to list all the stuff as ācontainsā (for stuff that is in) and āused to makeā (as stuff that is used but filtered out). If possible also in machine-readable form (database linked to the goodsā UPC/EAN code is sufficient).
Better for everybody, and hard-working nice-person bureaucrats can spend their energy where it really matters.
All food products have regulations about the images shown on their labels. Thatās why any packages showing prepared food containing ingredients not in the package must have the words āServing suggestionā - and that happened because at some point someone less intelligent than you couldnāt figure out that what was on a box front might not be in a box, and then they sued a company.
Result: laws got written.
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You got too many lawyers and thatās the result. In saner jurisdictions obvious stupidity gets laughed out of the courts.
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Actually, thatās the federal law.
USA counts as a jurisdiction. And exactly because the laws and regulations it is a laughing stock of the rest of the world.
EU is getting close though. I wouldnāt cry if Brussels gets nuked and the increasing amount of bureaucracy gets turned into decreasing amount of radiation.
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