When it comes to beer, the Germans don't mess around. The country's 500-year-old Purity Law, one of the world's oldest food safety laws, is as clear as your favourite pilsner—only three ingredients are "permitted" in beer production: barley, hops, and water.But recent research from the Munich Environmental Institute suggests that there is an unwelcome fourth ingredient in German beers: a cancer-causing weed killer called glyphosate.Researchers from the Munich lab tested the country's 14 most popular brews and found that all of them contained trace amounts of glyphosate, ranging from 0.46 to 29.74 micrograms per liter.So what does that mean in real terms? For starters, glyphosate has been labelled as probably carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). But these results also suggest that some beers contain as much 300 times the legal limit of glyphosate in drinking water in Germany, according to those who undertook the study.
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Needless to say, this pissed off a lot of Germans who pride themselves on the purity and quality of their beer. Sophia Guttenberger, a geneticist from the Munich Environmental Institute, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle that glyphosate should simply be neither "in beer nor in our bodies."But the bräu industry and regulatory agencies are downplaying the alleged risk of glyphosate and calling into question the scientific integrity of the Munich Environmental Institute. "An adult would have to drink around 1,000 liters (264 US gallons) of beer a day to ingest enough quantities to be harmful for health," Germany's Federal Institute for Risk assessment said in a statement.Anheuser-Busch InBev, the company that brews Hasseroeder, the brand found to have the highest concertation of glyphosate, called out the Munich researchers' small sample size and rejected their conclusions on the basis that they were "absurd and completely unfounded," according to Reuters.The patent for glyphosate is owned by Monsanto and it is sold commercially as Roundup, to the tune of 300 million pounds per year in the US alone.