Let’s be honest: Beer’s entire purpose for existing is to fuck you up mentally and physically. It might sound like a buzzkill, but that’s the way it is. Beer isn’t “good” for you. It’s not healthy, and you probably don’t need a nutritional facts label to tell you that. But unfortunately, that’s not a choice you typically have.
Whenever there’s a question about why the alcohol industry is the way it is, 99 times out of 100 it’s related to Prohibition. The reason that beer is not required to list nutritional information—or even ingredients!—is a holdover from that weird, 13-year stretch that arguably did more to shape our current beverage alcohol industry than any other event in modern history.
This Vox explainer is a pretty easy read as to why that is, but the TL;DR of it is that after Prohibition’s repeal, Congress passed the Alcohol Administration Act, which placed the regulation of alcohol under the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) rather than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Understandably the government hesitated to jeopardize a new and steady stream of cash in the form of tax revenue from the now-legal vice, so it makes sense that loose regulations overpowered the argument for informed consumer choice. After all, it’s not fun to know that the average American drinker gets nearly 20% of their daily calories from alcohol, according to a 2014 study by the American Journal of Public Health. Profits over people triumphed once again.
There has been very little evolution since that precedent was established. Though the TTB has guidelines on what size font labels need to have, outside of requiring things like the name and address of the producer or a warning for pregnant women, the agency doesn’t ask breweries to list nutritional information or ingredients. On a federal level, businesses don’t even have to include the alcohol content, which is absolutely wild to me. How on earth it was deemed more important to know the city where the beer was bottled and not what’s actually in the bottle, I’ll never know.
And sure, I might not want to know how many calories are in the beer I’m drinking—but it’s absurd not to be given the opportunity for even a ballpark estimate. The FDA has required all packaged food to feature nutritional information for nearly 30 years. Chain restaurants started adding calorie counts as early as 2009 in California, with complete federal participation by 2018. But because the alcohol industry falls outside FDA purview, it remains exempt.
“As distasteful as the information might seem—do I really want to know how many calories are in that barrel-aged Stout I savor on a frigid Chicago Tuesday evening?—yes, I would want to know,” says Josh Noel, food and beer journalist at the Chicago Tribune and author of Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch and How Craft Beer Became Big Business. “[I]f the calorie/carb counts were there on the bottle/can, it would very likely impact my shopping decisions and consumption habits. Though now that I think about it, the information might also cause me to modify other habits so that I could continue enjoying those Stouts with an eye toward overall health and wellbeing. After all, I greatly enjoy those beers, and already know they’re hardly a picture of good health.”
A typical IPA has around 200 calories per 12 ounces, which is 10% of a 2,000-calorie-a-day intake. It goes up from there. “Heavier beers like Stouts and Porters are generally higher in both calories and carbohydrates,” says Kristin Gillespie, a registered dietitian and certified nutrition support clinician in Virginia Beach, Virginia. “As a general rule of thumb, beers with higher alcohol content are often higher in calories and carbs than their lower-calorie counterparts.”
Editors note: These days, your average stouts and porters clock in around the same as IPAs in terms of calories and carbs as the craft sector continues to increase its average ABV year after year. to which IPAs and Double IPAs are a massive contributor. Unless the brewing process involves additional sugar sources or increases the resulting ABV, nothing about the color of a beer contributes to its “weight.”
Understandably, requiring breweries—especially small breweries, or those that focus on one-off batches rather than core beers—to include nutritional information would add time and money to operations: a hard sell even during non-pandemic times. A number of owners chimed in on my recent Twitter thread about the subject, with plenty of valid points. “As a counter argument, it is an expensive and complicated process for small businesses. It would likely eliminate packaging on many single-release and seasonal beers. This is why a lot of the guilds are against it being mandatory,” says Rachael Akin, former co-owner of San Diego’s now-shuttered Benchmark Brewing. Lincoln Slagel, co-owner and brewmaster at Emancipation Brewing Company in Fairbury, Illinois, agrees with Akin. “As a very small brewery owner, I wouldn’t be able to pay for these services, or I’d have to only have three main beers and focus all efforts on those. I’m all for listing every ingredient on the label, but all nutritional content doesn’t seem worth it.”
The infrastructure for lab testing is already in place for many—though not all—breweries. Some breweries like Bell’s already list nutritional information for their various brews. Off-site testing facilities like White Labs already offer this service (for a price, of course). And for those who don’t have access to lab equipment, I imagine it could be similar to renting a canning machine. I can’t predict with absolute certainty that adjacent businesses would crop up to meet the demand if regulations were introduced—but that really doesn’t seem too far-fetched, either.
Of course it’s easy for me, a non-brewery owner, to make grandiose demands like this when I have no money at stake. But when it comes to actual safety, the argument for including ingredients shifts away from simply a financial burden to a potential life-and-death scenario.
“In a perfect world all beer would be labeled,” says beer expert and historian Mike Stein, who has Type 1 diabetes. He explains that while he understands the limitations that small breweries face when it comes to the costs of expanded requirements, his inability to have even a general idea of sugar content puts him in a perilous position. “Honestly, I’d rather a small brewery tell me there’s ~45 grams of carbs in their Imperial Milk Stout and it contains lactose rather than have my blood glucose fly out of range because the sugar content is higher than I assumed or because my friend doesn’t know ‘Milk Stout’ means lactose whereas ‘Cream Ale’ doesn’t necessarily mean there’s dairy in that product.”
Recently, comedy podcast Boos and Brews recounted an avoidable emergency due to lack of ingredient transparency. “We once had a Stout send one of our co-hosts to the urgent care for randomly adding raw cayenne to the brew,” they explain. “Insane when everyone has food allergies these days!”
Between allergies and dietary restrictions, having access to less information puts unnecessary burden and risk on the consumer. Obviously, labeling requirements put in place by federal regulators aren’t a magic cure-all. Shadowy phrases like “natural flavor” and weird code words for sugar mean the average consumer skimming the label might not fully grasp what’s in their beer. But it would be a start. It’s time for us to stop embracing willful ignorance when it comes to beer—and everything else.
