Fish beer

It's been nine years, give or take a month, since I've knowingly eaten meat. I actually passed my ninth anniversary of deciding to go vegetarian back in September, but I had a moment of buffalo-wing-inspired weakness two months into what started out as a willpower experiment, so I'll call it an even nine. My rationale was pretty flimsy: I was eating some scrambled eggs while watching the news, and a graphic for a piece on something involving human fetuses looked waaaaaay too much like my meal. That put me off anything that wasn't a plant for a few days, and somewhere in that time I decided to see how long I could do it for. Long enough, apparently, for meat to get stuck in my mental "not food" category, like tree bark or crayons. A high school friend told me, a year or so ago, that of all the people we hung out with who went veggie I had the stupidest reason, but I was also the only one who stuck with it. So go figure.

Of course, since then I've eaten food with animal-parts in them by accident (pizza with diced ham hidden under the cheese, power bars made with fish oil, a bit of raw squid that I didn't see stuck to my hand at lunch, etc.). But, and this brings me to what actually made me think to write this up, I learned yesterday that much of the beer I drink is made with fish extract. Gadzooks.

From what I can tell, the fishtastic brands I usually drink (namely, Guinness and Smithwicks) are prepared with a fish extract called isinglass, but the finished product doesn't actually contain any meaningful amount of it. Basically, the isinglass is used as finings, a liquid that's mixed with the beer to collect the suspended yeast as it settles. It's a bit like oil in vinegar, except it forms layers of yeast/finings globs at the top and bottom of the cask, with the actual beer in the middle. But not all beer goes through the fining process: mostly it's just cask-conditioned ales, where the beer isn't filtered or pasteurized before it's shipped from the brewery. And even some cask-conditioned ales use non-animal based finings, like carrageenan (which is thankfully, given its ubiquitousness, made from seaweed). The best resource I've found is this list, which includes the actual responses breweries provided when asked about the finings used in their products.

For me, isinglass is the limit of what's acceptable in my diet. If I didn't like Guinness as much and if isinglass beer was labeled in some way, I know I would probably avoid it. But I think the point of being veggie is to understand and to make intelligent choices about what you consume, so I have no problem being flexible on this particular point. And frankly, while I love draught Guinness, I usually prefer other brands when I'm picking up something to bring home, so it's a non-issue most of the time.

As a post-script, most big-label beers like Budweiser and Miller are made with corn or rice, since it's cheaper than malted barley. Questions of taste and quality aside, these beers don't have enough protein in them to really foam, and often pepsin, which is derived from pork products, is used as a heading agent. Questions of taste and quality not aside, well, let's just say I'm glad to learn about the pepsin, because it gives me an excuse to avoid corn beer.