Beer trivia. What additives are used in brewing and preserving beer?

Question

We always talk about additives and the big brewers do not want to list them (even a few) but what are they?

Answer 1

Hops is the main preservative of beer. Specifically, they oils that are extracted during the boiling process.

That and alcohol.

This is why we have India Pale Ales and Russian Imperial Stouts. High hops and high alcohol preserved the beer for long see and land voyages.

EDIT:

Oops...my bad. I really need to get into the habit of proof reading these things.

As a point of contention...Miller is believed to chemically alter its beer to prevent it from skunking. I however don't consider it real beer and stand by my original answer.

Answer 2

Info for the common misunderstanding of hops & Miller beers. The hops are indeed chemically treated. They are treated in such a way as to prevent the carbon ring responsible with the formation of a skunk-like smell (isopentenyl mercaptan) compound. The hops are called Rho hops.

I knew about the cobalt and I know many more are in or used in big brewery beers but I can only find a few.

Cut & paste articles.

In the mid-60s, for instance, about 50 people died when brewers began putting cobalt sulfate into their products as a foaming agent. Beverage manufacturers don't intentionally murder their customers, of course. But the fact is that a fair number of people are allergic or otherwise sensitive to booze additives, and in the absence of labeling the only way to find out if there's anything bad in a given brew is to take a hefty swig of it and see if you keel over.

I don't mean to single out the Miller company, but you may be interested to know that Miller Lite contains propylene glycol alginate, water, barley malt, corn syrup, chemically modified hop extracts, yeast, amyloglucosidase, carbon dioxide, papain enzyme, liquid sugar, potassium metabisulfite, and Emka-malt, whatever that is. I would venture to say that light beers as a class tend to have more additives than others, simply because they'd be totally flat and tasteless otherwise.

Cobalt salts stabilize beer foam synthetic banned in 1966 due to Toxic effects on heart.

Isinglass is made from the air bladders of sturgeons: thus, "fish guts".

*&^%$#@!*

Yesterday scientists in the USA revealed that beer contains small traces of female hormones. To prove their theory they fed 100 men 12 pints of beer and observed that 100% of them started talking nonsense and couldn't drive.

Answer 3

Ininglass is an additive for finning beer.

Cobalt was once used as a foam stabilizer.(no longer used)

Probably BHT and others. I have read once that more than 50 even a 100 additives were used in some beers.