Fluorescent lights illuminate the inside of Chatham County resident Keith Turner’s basement as he pipes water into a steel kettle, called a hot liquor tank. He’s brewing beer, a craft he’s been working at for 30 years.
“When you came along, I took a break for a few years because it was just a lot going on,” Turner said.
Coincidentally, he’s also been my dad for the same amount of time. The setup he uses has evolved since I was a kid. It used to sit on a blue cart in our garage in New Hill, and gravity pushed the fluids from one kettle to the next. Now, motorized pumps circulate water between three custom-made steel kettles. His brewing operation fills an entire backroom in the basement.
“When we moved into this house, your mom indulged me to let me build this little home brewery,” Turner said.
He mills his grains — mostly pilsner — and adds them to the mash, a sort of barley porridge. Water circulates through copper coils in the hot liquor tank, then pours over the mash, heating it in one of the steel kettles. It’s a sophisticated rig, run partially from his computer, where he monitors the temperatures of the hot liquor tank and mash tun. He’s even installed his own reverse-osmosis filter, which growled from the room next door.
He bought the $700 filter to eliminate perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called PFAS or forever chemicals. They’re used in non-stick cookware, textiles, food packaging and other manufacturing processes. Several thousand variations of the compound exist, and regulators have only begun to put limits on a select few. In May, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled back regulations on those still used in manufacturing today, despite evidence that these forever chemicals cause a range of health problems, including high cholesterol, impaired liver function and decreased vaccine efficacy.
Evidence also suggests that PFOA and PFOS — two types of PFAS — can cause complications during pregnancy and lead to low birth weight. The EPA has extended the deadline for companies to comply with drinking water standards for both.
Researchers say, ‘Hold My Beer’
But PFAS isn’t just a problem for hobbyists like my dad. A recent study titled “Hold My Beer” from RTI International sampled commercially available beers and tested them for forever chemicals.
“Well, as an occasional beer drinker myself, I wondered if PFAS in the water would translate into PFAS in our beer,” said Jennifer Hoponick Redmon, senior director of environmental health and water quality at RTI.
In 2021, Redmon bought beer from stores around town — RTI is located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park — and she fed samples through some very fancy, very expensive machines.
Beer was put into a liquid chromatography machine, PFAS chemicals were extracted and run through a mass spectrometer. Then it spit out a graph.
“When we look at that visually, we see little spikes,” Redmon said. “Where we see those spikes, it tells us what type of PFAS compound is in the beer — if there is any.”
Redmon said they found PFAS in 95% of all the samples they tested. They sampled beers brewed in seven North Carolina counties, as well as several locations in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. The study targeted counties where high levels of PFAS had already been found. That included Mecklenburg, Chatham and New Hanover counties.
“We did find, indeed, that there was a definite linkage between PFAS in water supplies and PFAS in the actual beverage that you can purchase,” Redmon said.
The study also captured a snapshot of how pollutants move through our waterways. In 2019, Mecklenburg County PFAS levels were relatively low, about 4.8 parts per trillion, compared to Chatham County, where PFAS levels exceeded 200 ppt.
The researchers sampled five cans from a pack of beer brewed in Mecklenburg and found levels of PFNA — which is used in firefighting foam and other industrial applications — above the previous EPA drinking water standard, as well as traces of five other forever chemicals in one of the cans. The other four all contained traces of PFOS.
“You might have a pulse of PFAS coming in from firefighting foam or something discharging into a river,” Redmon said. “That might be more of a time-sensitive pulse versus if you have PFAS contamination from a lake supply of drinking water.”
Redmon said her team is interested in working with breweries on improved filtration techniques. The NC Craft Brewers Guild provided the following written statement when asked about the study:
The NC Craft Brewers Guild recognizes that access to safe water is a fundamental human right. Our breweries, along with other food and beverage industries, rely on a clean water supply for the production of high quality products.
The NC Craft Brewers Guild advocates at the federal, state, and local levels for a clean municipal water supply, along with safe and effective remediation options. The quality of our water is critical not only to the long-term vitality of North Carolina’s craft beer industry, but also for the health and safety of every one of our communities.
What happens when nothing’s in the water
That’s study found that canned beer from large-scale breweries was less likely to contain PFAS, either because it wasn’t in the municipal water supply or because they had more advanced filtration.
Small businesses — whether you’re a brewery, coffee shop or kitchen — depend more heavily on their local water utility for filtration. And when it comes to brewing beer, water is everything — or at least 90% of everything. It takes around seven or eight gallons of water to produce one gallon of beer. So, when the news broke that Chemours had been polluting the lower Cape Fear River with toxic GenX, a type of PFAS, brewers rushed to their local water utilities.
“The public water is the base for the product that they’re then refining and selling to the public,” said Cammie Bellamy, a spokesperson for the Cape Fear Public Utility. “They had questions not just about PFAS, but about chlorination, about water hardness, about mineral content … all sorts of things.”
What we think of as water isn’t just hydrogen and oxygen atoms smashed together in a two-to-one ratio. The minerals and chemicals that give our tap water its watery taste create its profile. Brewers will often change the water’s chemistry to emulate other regions, but starting from scratch can be challenging.
Some things have changed since Redmon collected her samples in 2021. Water utilities in New Hanover and Chatham counties spent millions to upgrade their filtration systems to remove more PFAS. State regulators have passed groundwater standards for some PFAS, but groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center claim they could be doing more with their existing authority under the Clean Water Act.
Some polluters have been held accountable for discharging these chemicals into our water in the first place. It just happened after people like my dad had been drinking it for years, without anyone, including state regulators, knowing what it could do to them.
Down in the basement, my dad shakes the wort — a kind of barley tea — before putting the five-gallon jug and yeast into the fermentation chamber, made out of the refrigerator from my college dorm. In two weeks, he’ll take it out of my old dorm-room fridge, and he’ll have five gallons of PFAS-free pale ale.
