Name Your Poison — Americans’ 19th-Century Quest for ‘Pure’ Beer

The mid 1890s were a tense time for New York brewers. The state legislature spent close to two years debating a “Pure Beer” bill which would have, in the name of consumer health, restricted the brewing of “standard” beer to just four ingredients: “pure barley malt, pure hops, or pure extract of hops, pure yeast, and pure water…and nothing else of any kind, name or nature whatever.” That’s right, five pures for four ingredients.

If a brewer used anything else under this law, their beer would have been legally designated as “inferior,” and they would have had to place a large sign with the word “inferior” on it in a conspicuous place within their brewery. They also would have had to stamp the word “inferior” on the label of every cask, keg, barrel, and bottle of beer that they sold, plus a listing of every extraneous ingredient used. Every retailer and wholesaler likewise would have needed to post a sign in their place of business, indicating whether they sold “standard” or “inferior” beer. And that was all on top of the inspections—this law would have required the State Board of Health to test samples of every brewery’s beer every three months to ensure compliance.

The bill was designed to filter out “adulteration” in the brewing industry: the controversial practice of brewing with basically any ingredients besides those typical ones listed above. In common discourse, adulteration ranged from outlandish ideas about crooked brewers throwing poisons and acids into their beer to the far more common practice of brewing with adjuncts like corn, rice, or glucose. By the time this Pure Beer bill came around, many brewers—including those in New York—were doing the latter.

Adulteration became a sticky topic in American beer throughout the late 19th century, and was one of many ways beer crossed paths with the wider public health debates of the era. The argument over what can and should go into beer, and whether any of it was dangerous, reflected a complex mixture of Americans’ growing concerns over the food they ate, mounting temperance propaganda, and the self-serving rhetoric of brewers themselves.

To tell that story, we need to go back a couple decades. The concept of adulteration wasn’t new even then, but it took novel form from the 1850s onwards, as American beer began its shift toward mass-produced adjunct Lagers, and as American food also gravitated toward mass production. And it started at the most fundamental level, with Americans having to decide what belonged in beer in the first place.

ALUM AND STRYCHNINE AND CHALK, OH MY!

“Adulteration generally at the time did not mean a state of, you know, having it on with someone else’s spouse,” says Maureen Ogle, historian and author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. “What it meant was you were adding something to a product that shouldn’t be there, and the assumption was that there was a nefarious reason for doing it.” Rather than the proverbial hair in one’s soup, this was more like a baker cutting their flour with sawdust to make more money.

But to break the rules is to first know the rules; or, in this case, establish the rules. As historian and former journalist Lee Graves tells me, brewing in colonial North America and the early United States didn’t stick to a particularly rigid formula. Nearly anything would do—backcountry homebrewers, usually women, used molasses, corn and corn stalks, spruce, pumpkins, and even peapods to make beer. Enslaved brewers also included ingredients like persimmons. The country’s few commercial brewers were of course far more traditional in their approach—emulating English styles and traditions in urban centers like Albany, Philadelphia, and occasionally elsewhere—but the range of ingredients in brewing was a more open field in early 1800s America than it would be later in the century. And Germans had a lot to do with that shift.

“But once the Germans came into America, it was noted quite distinctly that … this Bavarian Lager was all malt,” explains Graves. “It was a very interesting revelation. Here was a beer that was all malt. It didn’t have all these other things.”

As American commercial brewing picked up in the 1850s, with German Lager brewers claiming an ever bigger slice of the pie, those four classic ingredients listed in the Reinheitsgebot (though it wasn’t called that until 1919!) and German beer purity laws, in New York’s later Pure Beer bill, and in most basic overviews of beer to this day, became the default acceptable ingredients in beer. Sometimes the only acceptable ingredients in beer.

“‘Adulteration generally at the time did not mean a state of, you know, having it on with someone else’s spouse. What it meant was you were adding something to a product that shouldn’t be there, and the assumption was that there was a nefarious reason for doing it.’”

Stateside German brewers themselves established that narrative during the 1800s. While they never outright committed themselves to German-style purity laws, they stressed that beer made their way was healthier, wholesome, nutritious, and overall superior to beer made any other way. The United States Brewers Association (known today as the Beer Institute) eventually became a champion of this narrative, publishing propagandistic surveys claiming brewery workers were healthier than average people despite drinking “an amount of Lager that would frighten ordinary people.” They also did things like send delegations of observers to Bavaria so they could report on how sober, orderly, and healthy a Lager-drinking society tended to be. This argument stemmed from both Germans’ ethnocultural beliefs and plain old salesmanship, but it was also a response to the omnipresent onslaught of anti-alcohol temperance reformers, who found adulteration to be one of their favorite drums to beat.

Reformers scoured commercial publications for information about the brewing process, then twisted what they found to portray beer as a “medley of poisons” that addicted, ensnared, and ultimately harmed hapless drinkers. Villainous brewers, the propaganda claimed, were secretly lacing their beer with chalk, sulfuric acid, alum, strychnine, opium, and many more dangerous adulterants, while “fogy chemists and physiologists” ran interference for the brewer cabal by convincing the public it was okay.

To be clear, many of the substances named had actually been used by brewers at some point, and in some way, like isinglass—a gelatin-like substance made from the swim bladders of fish, used as a fining agent to clarify the beer. But these lists were cobbled together from multiple cultures, techniques, and styles of beer. Temperance rhetoric omitted all such context to instead suggest that every brewer was recklessly tossing every manner of substance into every barrel of beer. This, naturally, led to some public confusion, and likewise led the German-American brewing community to double down on their counternarrative of wholesome and nutritious beer. Their tireless insistence, associated with purist Bavarian approaches to Lager brewing, and frankly the tastiness of early American Lagers, helped etch a strong impression into American minds about which ingredients made good beer good. This helped brewers in the near-term, but when American beer continued to evolve, the impression stuck.

WHAT’S IN YOUR GULLET?

After the Civil War came a second industrial revolution in the United States that greatly altered the way Americans ate.

As more food production moved into factories and urbanization lengthened the distance from farm to table, the fear that weird, unknown, or even dangerous substances might be finding their way into Americans’ food pervaded the public psyche. And not without reason—many producers really were putting new things into food, or else manufacturing it in new ways, or else creating new foods entirely. Some of it was not at all okay, but some of it was, and the public struggled to sort out which was which. These fears eventually led not only to investigative works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed the horrific conditions inside Chicago’s meatpacking industry, but also to regulations designed to improve them, like the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. But both of those were still years away.

“Reformers scoured commercial publications for information about the brewing process, then twisted what they found to portray beer as a ‘medley of poisons’ that addicted, ensnared, and ultimately harmed hapless drinkers. Villainous brewers, the propaganda claimed, were secretly lacing their beer with chalk, sulfuric acid, alum, strychnine, opium, and many more dangerous adulterants, while ‘fogy chemists and physiologists’ ran interference for the brewer cabal by convincing the public it was okay.”

“Canned foods were very problematic in the 1880s and 1890s,” Ogle explains. “Technology was fairly crude … people were like, what is in this? Why is the can kind of bulging a little bit? Why does it look weird? Why does the food look weird when I open it?”

A wave of concerned government legislators and self-anointed consumer watchdogs investigated these new foods with mixed results on all fronts. Some of them cared so much about making headlines that they made totally bogus claims. Others, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “poison squad,” took up the task of investigating these foods. “They [the squad] had very strict diet recommendations,” says Graves, “and they also consumed different chemicals that were used as preservatives at the time … and some of them got pretty sick.” As anyone who’s tried to discuss vaccines recently can appreciate, debating food safety was a war of rhetoric more than it was a rational discussion of the science.

Beer got caught up in this mayhem as well. Brewers were industrializing their products and changing their ingredients as much as anyone, particularly with adjuncts. As Pilsners, iconically pale and clear versus other Lager styles of the era, became more popular, American brewers came to rely on adjuncts like corn and rice to achieve the body and taste that drinkers demanded.

But this led to an obvious question: If a brewer put rice and corn in their beer, were they adulterating it? Between the public’s growing skepticism of industrial products and decades of rhetorical jousting with temperance reformers, the idea that “adulteration” equaled “bad” was pretty cemented by the late 19th century. 

But where did benevolent innovation end and adulteration begin? There were … competing arguments.

MERE PUFFERY

Pro-temperance groups especially loved playing in the gray areas of the adulteration debate. In 1881, the Business Men’s Moderation Society in New York hounded the state’s brewers to fill out a questionnaire disclosing what ingredients went into their beer. Several answered, copping to using things like corn, rice, and grape sugar while denying that they used more outrageous substances like potato starch or molasses. 

This makes sense—the use of cereal adjuncts and refined equivalents like glucose had gained wide acceptance in the industry over the past decade, especially among brewers chasing those paler, clearer Lagers. Trade publications readily celebrated the technical and operational benefits of adjuncts. Sure, some small upstart breweries were caught using the more questionable adulterants, likely trying to make a quick buck or shortcut efficiencies, but bigger operations decried such practices. They had too much to lose from shenanigans like that. But where they distinguished, critics generalized.

As Ogle recounted in her book, the BMMS treated every disclosure like a confession. They also conducted tests on various New York beers until they reportedly found one containing glucose, and made hay with that. They squared off with brewers for more than a year. The New York Times readily published every volley of the exchange, and every headline placed the words “brewers” and “adulteration” beside each other in bold type.

“In 1877, a Cincinnati brewer named George Weber responded to accusations that local brewers were adulterating beer by daring any member of the public to show that his beer contained rice, corn, glucose, grape sugar, or any other ‘poisonous drugs.’ Weber was so confident that his beer was pure that he offered up a $5,000 reward—over $100,000 today—to anyone who did so.”

This was primarily a PR war, after all. Temperance reformers scored victories not by being right but by sowing doubt, and they knew it. Government agencies often played supporting roles—official investigations into beer quality sometimes accused brewers of using dangerous adulterants without providing any actual evidence that they’d done so. The pro-temperance machine quickly converted those reports into damning headlines.

Brewers countered with their own propaganda, like the boastful USBA surveys mentioned above. Brewery advertisements regularly touted the purity of their products and described the care put into making them. But there was a pitfall to this advertising approach: Brewers competed with each other, too, and couldn’t resist throwing elbows from time to time.

In 1877, a Cincinnati brewer named George Weber responded to accusations that local brewers were adulterating beer by daring any member of the public to show that his beer contained rice, corn, glucose, grape sugar, or any other “poisonous drugs.” Weber was so confident that his beer was pure that he offered up a $5,000 reward—over $100,000 today—to anyone who did so.

But that’s not all. Weber also heavily implied that Cincinnati’s other brewers couldn’t make the same claim. And they didn’t like that. Eight of Cincinnati’s largest brewers put out a joint statement accusing Weber of disparaging their good names and of betraying German-Americans everywhere by “playing into the hands of the Temperance fanatics.”

Weber retorted with an 1850s throwback: that nothing he could say played more into the hands of temperance advocates than a brewer who adulterated their beer. Then he dared his fellow brewers to make his same promise—that they only made pure beer with no adulterants. It was, of course, a trick, because Weber knew that not all of his competitors could truthfully make that guarantee. When his challenge shut them up, Weber smugly concluded that “we don’t propose that our own good name shall suffer for the sake of an adulterator, whether he be located in Cincinnati or elsewhere.” And again, newspapers relayed every blow of this little spat—they even dubbed it “the Beer War”—to a public already skeptical about adulteration.

Less confrontational rhetoric from the brewing industry included mock conversations with doctors about the supposed health benefits of pure beer, backhanded comments from beer barons about how either corn or rice (whichever cereal they didn’t personally use) led to substandard beer, and reassuring statements about the cleanliness of their breweries. The back and forth went on for years, then decades, against a backdrop of ongoing skepticism about the quality of American food.

So amidst debates over whether oleomargarine should be dyed pink or, eventually, learning about the horrors of the meatpacking industry from Upton Sinclair, Americans listened to constant and nebulous volleys between brewers and activists about whether corn and rice belonged in beer … and whether corn or rice were even the extent of it.

PURITY TESTS

That brings us back to the Pure Beer bill in New York. The state’s brewers fought tooth and nail against the bill, to the point of leveraging contracts with New York’s hop growers to try and extort their support. In the end they were saved by a veto from the governor, but it was a close call.

New York’s was one of many kindred bills that popped up in state legislatures during the 1890s, backed by a plethora of official government investigations into beer from the USDA and local health boards alike. The federal government even considered a national anti-adulteration bill in 1896, which would have limited beer’s ingredients to the same four ingredients. It didn’t pass, but getting onto the congressional docket was probably too close for most brewers’ comfort at the time.

As Graves notes, over 100 pure food and beverage bills were introduced to Congress between 1879 and 1906, though none of them passed until the Food and Drug Act of the latter year.

The ultimate irony of beer’s reluctant inclusion into adulteration debates can be found in the fact that the New York Pure Beer bill’s writers claimed they drew inspiration from Germany’s own beer purity laws. In other words, the paragon image of pure beer that critics wanted to enforce upon brewers was based on a narrative that brewers themselves had been pushing for years. It was the new wave of German-American brewers who, from the 1850s onward, insisted over and over that proper all-malt beer was clean, healthy, wholesome, and pure, and that the public shouldn’t accept anything less. Other public health controversies, like court cases over Lager’s intoxicating effects and debates over whether Lager caused or prevented cholera, cemented even further the public’s perception of how Lager beer should look, taste, and affect a person’s body. In short, brewers had championed the standard that they ultimately did not want to be measured against.

And yet, brewers maintained their message even when their own recipe modifications, industrializing, and incorporation of adjuncts muddied it. Doing so exposed them to accusations of adulteration according to their own standards. The decades they then had to spend on the back foot—persuading the public that adjuncts were acceptable, fending off temperance onslaughts, and answering regulatory questions—represented a long sleep in a bed they’d made.

Adulteration’s legacy still pops up from time to time. Remember Corngate a couple years ago? Anheuser-Busch InBev released a series of commercials blasting Miller Lite and Coors Light for being made with corn syrup, neglecting to mention that Bud Light utilized rice for essentially the same purpose. That situation got litigious really fast, and it showed how easily the beer industry can slip back into the same fights it’s been having for over a century.

It also shows how beer’s entanglement with public health concerns has always been a matter of when and not if. It is a pairing to be expected, respected, and prepared for. Beer’s effects on people’s bodies and brains will lead to consistent and legitimate questions about how social institutions must deal with that power, whether that means legally determining intoxication, deciding what belongs in beer to begin with, considering nutrition labels for beer, or grappling with alcohol regulations during a pandemic.

And if history’s any indicator, these will be wars of words, not science.

Words by Brian Alberts
Illustrations by Colette Holston