Poisoned beer update: it’s (probably) not as bad as all that

Is this beer really formaldehyde-free?

Beijing residents can breathe easier today. Yanjing Beer, Beijing’s largest brewery and the producer of 11% of the nation’s beer output, said today that it stopped adding formaldehyde to its beer back in 2002. Taken together with the denials issued by Tsingtao and China Resources (makers of Snow beer), China’s beer market ought to be at least 35% formaldehyde-free.

Reports today have tried to reassure consumers that this scare is different from recent cases of poisonous food additives and counterfeit products. The 95% figure is from 2003, and was wrong then, too. And a little bit of formaldehyde won’t kill you – after all, it’s in the foreign beer, too. Beijing Evening News spoke with Zheng Yangming, director of the Department of Technical Quality at the Yanjing Beer Group:

Using formaldehyde as an additive in the brewing process was not invented in China, but was instead a foreign invention. To this day in foreign brewing textbooks and other materials, formaldehyde is still listed as a stabilizer…starting in the 1970s, foreign brewers began to eliminate formaldehyde as an additive during beer production. Entering the 21st century, major domestic breweries also stopped adding formaldehyde.

Zheng hedged, though, by not ruling out the presence of naturally-occurring formaldehyde in the water used to brew Yanjing.

Regulatory agencies are playing catch-up. Everyone was assured yesterday that the new Hygiene Standard for Fermented Spirits to be enacted in October would prohibit the use of formaldehyde as an additive in beer, but it turns out that there’s only a limit and not an outright ban. Will this be enough to resume exports to Korea and Japan?

Or perhaps we should just embrace it, and drink our formaldehyde-laden beer while eating firm, tasty formaldehyde-soaked squid, sitting in formaldehyde-filled rooms under the shadow of our formaldehyde-emitting wedding portraits.