Ciont et al. 2022 — Beer safety review: heavy metals in beer

Ciont and colleagues (Universities of Cluj-Napoca, Liège, Bari, South China University of Technology, and Harper Adams) review chemical, microbiological, and physical contaminants in craft and large-scale beer. Section 4.2 (“Heavy Metals”) narratively summarises the sources, transfer routes, and reported concentrations of heavy metals in beer, citing one primary quantitative dataset (Eticha and Hymete 2014, Ethiopian locally-manufactured beer) and describing aluminium and tin as the two metals of particular concern for beer. The review states that “metal mining, smelters, shredder plants, trash dumping, and incineration” raise environmental metal concentrations above natural background, that “heavy metals can be found in beer due to agricultural herbicides, fungicides, and bactericides,” and that brewing equipment (pipelines, tanks, filtration, fermentation, conditioning, carbonation, packaging) and packaging (barrels, aluminium cans) are additional transfer routes. The HACCP section reports that a heavy-metal concentration exceeding 0.04 mg/L at the raw-materials reception stage is treated as a substantial risk to human health, and assigns reception as a Critical Control Point.

Key numbers

Heavy-metals section (Section 4.2, pages 11–12). All quantitative concentrations attributed to other studies; the review reports no new measurements.

Eticha and Hymete 2014 (reference [72] in the source); mean concentrations in locally manufactured beer in Ethiopia (verbatim from page 12):

• Cd: 0.0014 mg/L
• Cu: 0.0368 mg/L
• Mn: 0.0954 mg/L
• Pb: 0.006 mg/L
• Zn: 1.5206 mg/L

The review states: “However, the risk evaluation of mean levels revealed no health risk associated with these heavy metals when consumed in beer” (page 12, quoting the Eticha and Hymete conclusion).

HACCP critical limit (Section 6, Table 4, page 13, “Reception of raw and auxiliary materials”): “A substantial risk to human health exists when heavy metal concentrations exceed 0.04 mg/L and when mycotoxin production exceeds 0.04 mg/L, mostly from Fusarium species.” Reception of raw and auxiliary materials is classified as a Critical Control Point (CCP=YES). The same row groups heavy metals and mycotoxins under a single 0.04 mg/L critical limit; the review does not separate per-metal critical limits and does not cite the specific regulation underlying the 0.04 mg/L figure.

Aluminium (page 11, qualitative): the review cites Blanco (reference list slot [79]; 2010 paper on Al in beers and silicon sequestering; the PDF’s body text on page 11 cites this as “[73]”, but reference-list slot [73] resolves to a different Soares paper — see Verification notes) for the observation that Al “has been reported to increase dramatically in people with Alzheimer’s disease and Down Syndrome.” The review lists factors influencing Al content in beer: brand and metal content of raw materials, adjuncts, and water; employment of Al-made processing equipment; kind and quality of packaging (purity and type of Al used in can manufacture; type and quality of the protective lacquer layer); length of time the can is in contact with the beer (storage period); pH of the beer; temperature; and presence of harmful substances such as acids and salts.

Tin (page 12, qualitative): “Although tin is widely used, beer contamination from raw ingredients, particularly barley and hops, is not. Plants contain just a trace quantity of this metal. Storing raw materials or intermediates in cans, such as must concentrate, can raise the tin concentration.” No quantitative tin values are reported in the heavy-metals section.

Lead and copper biosorption (page 12, qualitative): the review cites Han et al. 2006 (reference list slot [86]; the PDF’s body text on page 12 cites this as “[80]”, but reference-list slot [80] resolves to a different Redan paper — see Verification notes) on simultaneous biosorption of Cu(II) and Pb(II) by waste beer yeast; this is a treatment-of-metal-laden-wastewater study, not a beer-contamination dataset, and reports no beer concentration values.

Evidence Fitness

This source is a narrative review and does not contribute primary occurrence data on heavy metals in beer. It can support discovery (the heavy-metals section cites a small set of primary papers — Eticha and Hymete 2014 in Ethiopia; Blanco 2010 on aluminium; Han et al. 2006 on Cu/Pb biosorption — that warrant their own lookup), narrative framing of transfer routes from raw materials, brewing equipment, and packaging into the finished product, and the HACCP critical limit of 0.04 mg/L at reception. It is not eligible for pooled-percentile work on the fermented-beverages-non-tea-based row because it generates no new measurements. Reported public evidence label: Context only.

Methods (brief)

This is a narrative review. The Data Availability Statement on page 16 states: “No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.” The Author Contributions list initial draft preparation by C.C., A.E., and A.D.K.; writing-review-and-editing by O.L.P., A.P., T.E.C., and E.M.; and paper review by F.V., H.Z., and R.S. The review does not state a formal search strategy, database list, inclusion/exclusion criteria, or PRISMA flow diagram, and is therefore a narrative review rather than a systematic review.

The heavy-metals section (4.2) is qualitative and cites primary studies rather than re-analysing or pooling their data. The Eticha and Hymete 2014 values are reproduced from that paper’s abstract without independent verification of the methods used to generate them.

Implications

• Certification: contributes no direct occurrence data to fermented-beverages-non-tea-based. The 0.04 mg/L reception critical limit reported in the HACCP table is a process-control threshold for raw materials, not a finished-product specification, and the review does not source it to a named regulation; it should not be treated as a regulatory ceiling. The Ethiopia primary dataset cited within the review (Eticha and Hymete 2014: Cd 1.4 µg/L, Pb 6 µg/L mean) should be ingested directly from the primary paper if it becomes a candidate input for synthesis on the beer/fermented-beverages row.
• Courses: useful as a teaching reference for the contamination-source taxonomy in beer (raw materials, processing equipment, packaging) and as a discovery anchor for the Ethiopian locally-produced beer literature and the aluminium-in-cans literature.
• App: contributes no per-product concentration values; the Eticha and Hymete data is cited but should be sourced from the original.
• Discovery: the reference list (102 entries) contains several primary heavy-metals papers worth screening, including reference [72] Eticha and Hymete 2014 (Ethiopia, locally produced beer), [73] Soares et al. 2012 (review of Saccharomyces bioremediation), [74] Izah et al. 2017 (Nigeria, beverages), [76] Passaghe et al. 2015 (Italy, craft beer ICP-MS monitoring), [77] Pavel et al. 2011 (brewing-process heavy metal distribution), [79] Blanco et al. 2010 (Spain, aluminium content of beers), [80] Redan et al. 2019 (US, transfer of arsenic, lead, and cadmium from diatomaceous-earth filter aids), [81] Zufall and Tyrell 2008 (heavy metal ion effects on beer flavour stability), [82] Olšovská et al. 2012 (Czech Republic, beer contaminants), [84] Filippini et al. 2019 (Italy, aluminium and tin dietary intake), [85] Markovski et al. 2018 (US craft beer, metals), and [86] Han et al. 2006 (Cu/Pb biosorption).

Provenance notes

Open-access article distributed under CC BY 4.0 (license declaration on page 1 of the PDF). Published online 3 September 2022; received 7 July 2022; accepted 30 August 2022. Foods is an MDPI peer-reviewed journal indexed in PubMed Central and Web of Science. Accessed via the Manual Fetch Discovery autopilot.

The cite-key uses the first-author surname “ciont” (Călina Ciont, first author and joint first author with Alexandra Epuran per the † footnote) and year 2022. The raw-handle preserves the discover-skill filename.

Evidence tier set to C rather than B. This is explicitly a narrative review without primary data (per the Data Availability Statement) and without a systematic-review methodology (no documented search strategy, no PRISMA flow, no inclusion criteria). It functions as a discovery anchor and a narrative reference, not as primary or systematically-pooled evidence.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lead
• cadmium
• aluminum
• tin
• copper
• manganese
• zinc
• fermented-beverages-non-tea-based

Verification notes

No brand names appear in this source page. The review names beer styles (red ale, dark stout, pale ale, wheat wine, fruit, gueuze, dark lager, bock, pale lager, pilsner) and producing regions (Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, China, Europe) in its Table 1 contamination tables, but those tables concern biogenic amines and micro-plastics — not heavy metals — and the heavy-metals section (4.2) does not name any commercial brands. Part 12 brand-firewall does not apply to the heavy-metals content reported on this page.

The review is a narrative review, not a systematic review or meta-analysis. The Data Availability Statement on page 16 explicitly states “No new data were created or analyzed in this study.” All quantitative values reported in the ## Key numbers section are secondary citations of other studies (chiefly Eticha and Hymete 2014, reference [72]), reproduced as the review reports them. Direct verification of those values against the original Eticha and Hymete paper has not been performed in this ingest and would be performed at the time the primary paper is itself ingested into the wiki.

The HACCP critical limit of 0.04 mg/L for heavy metals at the raw-materials reception CCP (Table 4, page 13) is reproduced as the review states it. The review does not cite the specific regulation, codex standard, or industry guideline underlying this figure and treats heavy metals and mycotoxins as sharing the same 0.04 mg/L critical limit; this should be treated as a review-level claim rather than a regulatory baseline pending confirmation against the cited references [21, 68, 72, 89] grouped at that table row.

The metals: frontmatter list includes Cu, Mn, and Zn because the review reports concentration values for them (Eticha and Hymete data) even though those three are outside the HMTc 10-analyte certification list per CLAUDE.md Part 14. Aluminium and tin are included as HMTc analytes with qualitative-only coverage in the source; iAs, tAs, MeHg, tHg, Ni, and Cr-VI are not discussed in the heavy-metals section and are therefore absent from the metals list.

The ingredients: frontmatter is empty: the review discusses barley, malt, hops, water, and adjuncts as beer ingredients, but none of these are present in the current ingredients taxonomy as primary HMI tracking targets. The products: frontmatter uses fermented-beverages-non-tea-based as the closest existing umbrella; no beer-specific product page exists in the current taxonomy.

The jurisdictions list includes GLOBAL because the review draws on European, Asian, African, and South American primary sources, and ET (Ethiopia) because the only primary quantitative heavy-metals dataset cited (Eticha and Hymete 2014) is from Ethiopia.

The source PDF has an internal citation-numbering inconsistency in its heavy-metals section: the in-text citation numbers in the body do not match the slot numbers in the reference list for at least two papers in Section 4.2. Page 11 cites Blanco’s 2010 aluminium-in-beer paper as “[73]” in the body, but reference-list slot [73] is Soares and Soares 2012 (“Bioremediation of industrial effluents containing heavy metals using brewing cells of Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a green technology”); the Blanco paper is at slot [79]. Page 12 cites Han’s 2006 Cu/Pb biosorption paper as “[80]” in the body, but reference-list slot [80] is Redan et al. 2019 (“Factors affecting transfer of the heavy metals arsenic, lead, and cadmium from diatomaceous-earth filter aids to alcoholic beverages during laboratory-scale filtration”); the Han paper is at slot [86]. This page resolves the ambiguity by using the reference-list slot numbers throughout (Blanco=[79], Han=[86]), because those are the numbers that correctly resolve to the cited papers; the body-text numbers are noted parenthetically where each paper first appears so a later reader who is comparing this wiki page to the PDF body text can find the alignment without losing time to the PDF’s own bookkeeping defect. The Eticha and Hymete reference is at slot [72] in both the body text and the reference list, so that citation is unambiguous.

Audit subagent (2026-06-06) raised both reference-number mismatches as ⚠️ concerns; both verified against the source PDF reference list (pages 16–19) and applied as a citation-bookkeeping correction with this verification note.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.