Vegetarian Beer

Who knew?

Turns out that some beers use a substance called isinglass as a filter to help clarify beer. Isinglass, for those of you who haven’t clicked ahead to Wikipedia, is obtained from the swimbladders of fish and, when added to beer, helps to increase the rate of clarification by promoting flocculation (which is a fancy word for “creates clumps”): it helps to get the yeast out.

While this fact may not bother some vegetarians (after all, the isinglass is eventually removed with the yeast), it might be problematic for others. As a result, The Vegetarian Society put together a list of vegetarian beers.

I found this interesting because you never know what you’ll find in food. While this may be a case of preferring to stay ignorant about the real ingredients (I know several delicious dishes which probably wouldn’t seem so delicious were I to know how they were made), it also goes to show how difficult it is to track down and understand all the ingredients and processes which result in the food we eat.