Nut Browns - Dangerous?

Normally, or at least historically, "nut browns" are/were not made with nuts or flavored to taste like nuts. There have been some cases of modern craft brewers literally adding nuts or nut flavor, but the numbers of beers like this would probably be pretty low since craft brewers today have moved away from browns... and even fewer would call their beer a "nut brown" with tastes shifting to India brown, coffee brown, and the like.

 

A further interesting question is that if it's a commercial product, how would they get FDA/TTB approval for using ingredients known to be harmful to humans? Seems problematic in an era where a brewery had to get special approval to use some four leaf clovers in brewing a particular beer (for St. Patrick's day, IIRC).

https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...clovers-they-had-to-deal-with-the-fda.397204/

 

Nut brown refers to the colour.Ron Pattinson (@patto1ro ) has written this article in his blog ;
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/nut-brown-ale.html

 

OK as long as they are not using arsenic.

 

Who here is drinking generic beer?

 

This reminds me of about twelve years ago when I was in Newcastle, England with my band. After the gig we went to the pub and of course we wanted to have some Newcastle Brown. Curiously, there was none on tap. We asked our friend who brought us why that might be. He and his friend were aghast that we wanted that swill and proceeded to tell us that there were whole wards full of people in the hospital having been poisoned by Newcastle Brown! Haha, I'm sure they were joking about that but they were damn serious that it was not good for human consumption. I forget what we had instead but I had a few for sure and felt just fine the next day.

 

That's an old story - that Newcastle Brown caused people to go mad and were put in a hospital. I believe it's purely the stuff of urban legend but I could be wrong since I have no info on it... or it could be a case of a story that mutated from a little bit of truth.

 

I would immediately drop down the credibility of anyone seriously telling that tale to near zero. If that's the best marketing plan a craft brewer can dream up, he needs serious help.

 

On another note of beer being "dangerous", has anyone personally had or known someone that had an allergic reaction to a beer?

I have a severe nut allergy and always try to watch out, especially when drinking brown ales or stouts (as I find some have a nutty taste). Luckily for me those are my two least favorite styles of beer and therefore I hardly drink them.

I know some other alcohols are made with nuts/almonds but also heard somehow the alcohol may negate their "allergic properties". Maybe it's similar for beer?

 

This also makes me think of the old English standard and Traffic's version: John Barleycorn (Must Die)...."But little Sir John and his nut brown bowl".

I meant to reply to @marquis.

 

Here's my theory: 1) Newcastle Brown (and perhaps other generic nut brown brewers) used to contain caramel coloring, 2) a component of which (MEI-4) has been linked to cancer. 3) Pure undiluted caramel coloring is a skin irritant according to its MSDS. Some combination of these facts, with some exaggeration and mutation over time and multiple retellings, likely contribute to the stories you were told.

Hard to see how any brewery might have an incentive to put dangerous ingredients in beer, or rather how caramel color would be that big of a cost savings over malt to create that incentive.

 

In England Newcastle Brown was always a bottled beer, which is why you didn't find it on tap. It is also much more popular in the US than in the UK these days.

In the 1960s and 70s when most English beer was only about 3.2% abv, beers like Newcastle Brown at 4.8 (or whatever it is, can't be bothered to look it up) stood out and were regarded as “strong”. I think this is probably where the legend came from that it would drive you mad or land you in the hospital.

Older British drinkers often still have a notion of what is a strong beer that seems slightly odd to Americans or younger Brits. There are still pockets of the country where the locals will give you a friendly warning to be careful with that “loopy juice” if they notice you drinking a 6% beer.

 

Hah, I often get that warning when I order Old Peculier, which I think is just over 6% on cask.

Bottled Newkie Brown in pubs was common round my way ten years ago but not so much now. Not that I go looking, it tastes like hangover mouth.

 

When the drinking norm is to order another pint when you have just finished one and carry on doing that for hours,the warning is quite valid!
I have seen drinkers whom I regarded as bulletproof when drinking session beer being badly affected when the beer was 1% ABV higher.Which is why I consider that the US definition of session beer which goes up to 5% is ludicrous.

 

What Sharpski said above - I can see there possibly being an issue if a brewer uses artificial (caramel) coloring in their beer. However, most craft brewers wouldn't be caught dead using that - just using a small percentage of caramel malts in the brew, to get that color - and that is what nut brown is referring to, the color of the beer. If a brewer is using nuts in the beer, by US law they have to mention that fact on the label; don't know about elsewhere.
If using that artificial, it's so condensed that it could be an irritant, and probable not good for someone to drink in undiluted state, but the amount used in a batch of beer to get to the desired color is so small, percentage wise, that it would be unlike to cause any issues.

 

The dose makes the poison.

The EBC of Caramels are around 20,000, so that is a little under 10,000 Lovibond. The darkest roasted malts are in the 600 Lovibond range. A little caramel will darken the beer, it is like squid ink.

 

Hence Old Peculier's nickname of "lunatic's broth"... a more lovable term than "loopy juice."

This is what I always unscientifically figured as well. If an area gets a lot of intoxicated people from copious Newcastle Brown consumption, the authorities and doctors might start to affectionately refer to a part of a hospital as the "Newcastle Brown Ward." Combine that with beer nicknames like "loopy juice" and "lunatic's broth," and an urban legend starts to grow that there's something in the beer that causes mental illness. Looking on the web, I see a second-hand story claiming that Newcastle has high aluminum content and causes mental health problems. Another claims that the rumors spoke of a hallucinogenic additive or a form of alcohol that caused mental illness. I have no information either way, but this all just seems like the stuff of urban legend. Today, the Newcastle recipe was famously changed to remove the use of a chemical coloring due to consumer fears. You gotta wonder if all of this is actually related to the claims in the OP... not in a deliberate way, but in the way that the ghosts of the past continue to inflict anxiety over generations. (Which doesn't mean that the stories in the OP should be carelessly dismissed... there's always the possibility of some dangerous truths.)

 

The MSDS for caramel coloring has got to be what they're speaking of. It's only only semi-plausible explanation for that they're saying. Lots of global brewers use it in their "dark" beers.

That said--as someone below stated--the dose makes the poison. Hop extract (that so many folks are fond of) can irritate the hell out of skin, and we once visited a fellow who makes mint extracts and that stuff--undiluted--was so potent that it melted a plastic fork.
Diluted to fractions of a percent per million (or sometimes billion), this stuff isn't any more dangerous (to the skin) than other beers. Caramel coloring is pretty gross, though, and is unnecessary to achieve beer color if using real-deal malt.

 

Caramel colouring was used in a huge number of British beers. Other than in Porter and Stout, most colour in British beers came from dark brewing sugars and caramel. In Scotland, it was even worse. They'd use caramel to colour a pale beer to all sorts of darker shades. And caramel is probably still used for colour corrections by longer-established breweries. Timothy Taylor's Dark Mild is Golden Best with added caramel. I'm sure there are other similar examples.