“Humans are sick.”
Honestly, by now I thought this was relatively common knowledge, but apparently not.
In case you didn’t know, some beers do indeed use a small part of a fish while undergoing the pint making process. Ooo lardy da.
As this news is coming to you on a Monday, chances are you might still be nursing a sore head. I know I am, following on from one of my most painful Sunday’s in personal history. But less about that. Just what goes into your pints?
Well obviously there’s four main ingredients: grains, hops, yeast, and water.
However there’s a hidden ingredient called isinglass, which comes from the bladder of certain fish, and goes into a lot of beer, including Carling, Coors Light, Foster’s, and Kronenbourg.
Guinness famously (or infamously) used isinglass in the brewing process, however they stopped using it back in 2018, making Guinness suitable for vegans and vegetarians.
Isinglass was originally made using parts of the sturgeon fish, however other methods have since been created using cod and hake too.
Essentially isinglass is used to filter out sediment from beer.
As you can probably imagine, yeast can make beer rather cloudy and sedimented. Isinglass, however, reacts with yeast particles in the beer, causing them to sink to the bottom, thus making them easy to filter out making the beer smoother and less cloudy.
Countless people who have just recently found out about this process online have taken to social media to voice their disgust. One person wrote: “Humans are sick. You need help.” Another commented: “Now if we can just remove isinglass from beer production.”
Personally I don’t know why people are so bothered. It’s only a process.
