Asbestos and Beer
Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency (FDA) banned the use of asbestos, causing Americans to exclaim, “Wtf! Asbestos was still legal?” This indeed came as a shock to anyone who paid a company thousands of dollars to send a team of workers in hazmat suits to pry the asbestos paneling from their rumpus rooms.
Asbestos was once considered a magical mineral that found its way into many industrial applications—(per Wikipedia) “fire-retardant coatings, concrete, bricks, pipes and fireplace cement, heat-, fire-, and acid-resistant gaskets, pipe insulation, ceiling insulation, fireproof drywall, flooring, roofing, lawn furniture, and drywall joint compound.” According to the FDA, it’s still used in certain industrial applications: “diaphragms, sheet gaskets, brake blocks, aftermarket automotive brakes/linings, other vehicle friction products, and other gaskets.” One use Wiki neglects to mention—liquid filtration. With long, thin fibers they were great for removing particulates from everything from cigarettes (swear to god) to water. And as recently as the 1970s, beer.
I first encountered a reference to breweries using asbestos to filter their beer when I saw an old patent for a Belgian system from the 19th c. I assumed that this was a hoary old contraption from an age when we often deployed inventions we didn’t fully understand. I was therefore a little shocked to learn that we were using into my lifetime. As recently as 1979, 10% of American breweries were still using asbestos to filter beer (which was better than wine, where a third of producers used it). According to lawsuits filed and won, some Anheuser-Busch plants and Genesse were a couple of the breweries that used it. But it wasn’t just gee-whiz American brewers. In Europe they used a filter that worked best under these circumstances: “The asbestos should always be whisked up to a cream with water and added slowly to the circulating pulp.” Creamy asbestos! In the 1960s, German brewers added asbestos to their diatomaceous earth filters for added clarity.
Of course, the British used asbestos as well, but their novel practices may well have led to a massive, nine-fold increase in cancer among their target users (ie, the humble punter). The reports, which came from a 2019 scholarly article* on the matter, are frankly gobsmacking:
“The patient acknowledged that he was exposed to asbestos in his occupation as a publican (landlord/manager of a British public house (“pub”) or bar). He explained that it was common practice to take the “slops” (the beer that had splashed into a bucket below the hand pump used for serving draught beer in a typical British pub) at the end of the day, add a slurry of asbestos and then run them through a filter – he made a circular swishing gesture with his hand to show how this was done. The asbestos-filtered “slops” were then served to the (presumably unsuspecting) first customers into the pub the next day. The patient thought this practice was quite common at that time.”
If you began your drinking after 1980 in Europe or North America, you should be safe. Nevertheless, I have to say I don’t fault the EPA for making the asbestos ban full and final.
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* Fitzgerald, R.C., Rhodes, J.M. Ingested asbestos in filtered beer, in addition to occupational exposure, as a causative factor in oesophageal adenocarcinoma. Br J Cancer 120, 1099–1104 (2019).