14 DAY TRIAL // Here is a rather shocking piece of news that might forever cure your sweet tooth for beer. Provided that you have one such fictional anatomical part to begin with, that is.
Long story short, researchers claim that, after analyzing over 2 dozen samples, they have found that German beer contains teeny tiny bits and pieces of plastic that, not at all surprisingly, are not included on the list of ingredients.
Writing in the journal Food Additives and Contaminants: Part A, the researchers explain that these fragments are known to the scientific community as microplastics.
They come in a surprisingly wide variety of shapes, but they do have one thing in common: none of them measures more than 5 millimeters (about 0.2 inches) in length, the specialists go on to detail.
The Alpha Galileo Foundation informs that, as part of their investigation, the researchers behind this research project collected and analyzed a total of 24 beer samples. The brews were both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, and they were all bought from local supermarkets in Germany.
This might come as a bit of a shock, but as it turns out, all the beers whose makeup the scientists took the time to analyze were found to contain microplastics. In fact, the only difference was the shape of the plastic fragments found floating in them.
Thus, it appears that the concentrations for granular material ranged from 5% to 71%. The ones for fibers and indistinct fragments, on the other hand, ranged from 3% to 57%, and 14% to 87%, respectively, depending on the origin of the beer.
“In all 24 beer samples microplastic was found. In most cases individual particles were found, although entangled fibers were observed also in a few cases. Fragments were the most abundant foreign items while fibers and granular material had comparatively low numbers,” the researchers explain.
“Most fibres were transparent, but blue, black or green ones were also present. Fragments and granular particles were whitish or transparent with the occasional occurrence of green and yellow ones,” they go on to detail in their paper in the journal Food Additives and Contaminants: Part A.
Even more disturbing, one of the beer samples was found to contain a nearly complete insect corpse, and the presence of a glass shard about 600 μm in size was documented in another. For the time being, researchers cannot say how and why these contaminants ended up in the beers they analyzed as part of this study.
Interestingly enough, the specialists claim that, given the outcome of this research project, it might not be too far-fetched to argue that tap water in Germany, maybe also in other parts of the world, probably contains microplastics and all sorts of other “bonus” ingredients as well.