Beer : Health and Nutrition

108 Chapter Five
Stringer (1946) noted that the levels of vitamins in beer are proportional to original
gravity (see Chapter 3). Of course, this will depend on the nature of the grist materials
employed. If the beer is all malt, or is produced with the employment of cereal-based
adjuncts, then the vitamin level would be higher than one produced from a grist including
a high proportion of sugar.
Earlier I mentioned the meeting at the Horse Shoe Hotel. It is intriguing to quote
another contributor to the discussion, Colonel C.J. Newbold:
[I have] a strong belief that, speaking quite generally, the human body knows what
it wants. In that connection [I want] to say something about gravity. [I believe
that] England and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that tax
beer on its strength. [I am] not arguing that this system is not a good one from
a revenue and perhaps other points of view, but there is another system adopted
by all other beer-drinking countries and that is to tax it on volume irrespective
of strength. In the latter system the average gravity in that country will probably
settle down at the gravity that the people want.
His point was that beer gravity (and presumably selection of grist materials) are heavily
impacted by tax considerations in countries where the levy is on the basis of strength
as opposed to volume, and that this will have implications for the content of ‘useful’
materials in the beer. In the UK duty is no longer levied on the wort upstream, but
since the late 1980s has been on the basis of alcohol content of the end product. There
remains, therefore, a prevalence of products that are comparatively low in alcohol as
compared to those in other countries (e.g. the US) where, for the most part, all beers
attract the same rate of taxation, irrespective of strength.
Beers tend to contain very low levels of thiamine, owing to the fact that it is taken up
by yeast (Stringer 1946). Agranoff (2000) hypothesises that it wasn’t ever thus. The high
levels of residual yeast present in eighteenth-century beer will have provided vitamins
to the diet and might have been part of the reason why beer was portrayed by William
Hogarth as leading to a healthier lifestyle (e.g. less beri beri and other neurological diseases)
than gin. There is no modern evidence for the relative vitamin ‘charge’ in ltered
beers and their counterparts that still contain yeast (i.e. naturally conditioned beers),
though the latter would be expected to make a greater contribution providing the yeast
is consumed. (A former colleague of mine was devoted to his Worthington White Shield,
with its goodly charge of yeast in the bottom of the bottle. He would pour out the beer
with extreme caution, such that the glass only contained bright beer. Then, with gusto,
he would drain the sediment directly from bottle to throat, declaring with satisfaction
that he was ‘getting his vitamins’.) However, in attempts to fortify beer with thiamine, it
was found that when the vitamin was added to beer it was soon eliminated by unknown