The Food Safety and Modernization Act has led to increased oversight of beer production. Throughout history, commercially available beer has remained unregulated relative to other food and beverage products. At present, the brewing industry is transitioning from minimal oversight to regulations more in line with other commercial beverages. Mounting pressure from regulatory bodies and industry rivals has created considerable demand for better QA/QC procedures pertaining to beer. One topic of growing interest and concern is the heavy metal content of finished beer. There are currently no impactful regulations on the heavy metal content of commercially available beer. Recent research has indicated the presence of previously unknown heavy metal contaminant exposure routes in the industry. Two areas of particular concern are: 1) diatomaceous earth filter-aids facilitate the transfer of arsenic. 2) low grade or incorrectly graded stainless steel is suspected of leaching chromium into process water and beer in progress. This is worrisome, as it is the responsibility of brewers to ensure that consumers are not chronically ingesting trace metals. The industry needs methods that ensure quality control. An optimized sample digest procedure would be a significant boon to this effort. Inadequate chemical digest leads to analyte losses and subsequent false negatives. An adequate digestion protocol would prepare a sample for elemental analysis, without losing analyte or introducing heavy metal contaminants. Applying such methods to beer is a difficult task. Beer is a loose term that applies to a complex organic sample matrix with distinct compositions and infinite varietals. Even consecutive executions of the same brewing processes can produce batches with significant chemical differences. The focus of this presentation is the development of analytical sample digest methods; these methods will enable brewers and chemists alike to probe their beer with rigor and reproducibility.

Developing analytical grade chemical digestion procedures for beer

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.