Yes, most beer contains trace amounts of glyphosate. In a 2019 study by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund that tested 20 alcoholic beverages, 19 contained detectable glyphosate, including well-known brands like Budweiser, Coors, Miller Lite, and Sam Adams. The levels ranged from a few parts per billion in organic brands to above 25 ppb in some conventional beers. Only one brand tested, Peak Beer, came back clean.
How Glyphosate Gets Into Beer
Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used herbicide, sprayed on crops to kill weeds. But it also gets onto barley and wheat through a practice called pre-harvest desiccation, where farmers spray glyphosate directly on the crop shortly before harvest to dry it out and speed up the process. Because barley seeds sit exposed on the plant, they receive the spray directly, which may make them especially prone to absorbing residues.
Once glyphosate is on the grain, the brewing process does almost nothing to remove it. Most pesticides get filtered out during mashing (when grains are soaked) or break down during boiling. Glyphosate is different. It dissolves extremely well in water and remains stable at temperatures above 100°C. Research published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found that roughly 95 to 97% of glyphosate carries over from grain into the liquid wort after mashing and boiling. During fermentation, the carryover actually reached about 110%, meaning the concentration slightly increased as liquid volume decreased. In short, whatever glyphosate is on the barley ends up in your glass.
How Much Is in Popular Brands
The U.S. PIRG testing found that large conventional brands like Coors, Tsingtao, and Miller Lite each contained glyphosate levels above 25 ppb. Even organic beer wasn’t entirely free of it. Samuel Smith Organic came in at 3.5 ppb, likely due to environmental drift from neighboring farms or trace contamination in shared supply chains, since glyphosate use is prohibited in organic farming.
These results aren’t unique to American testing. A 2016 study in Germany found glyphosate in every beer sample tested, despite Germany’s famous beer purity law (Reinheitsgebot). A 2018 study in Latvia reached the same conclusion: glyphosate was present in all tested samples. The contamination appears to be a global issue tied to how barley is grown, not how beer is brewed.
Whether These Levels Are Dangerous
The amounts found in beer are extremely small, and every major risk assessment has concluded they fall far below harmful thresholds. The European Union sets an acceptable daily intake (ADI) for glyphosate at 0.5 mg per kilogram of body weight. This is the amount a person could consume every single day for a lifetime without appreciable health risk. The U.S. reference dose is even more permissive at 1.0 mg per kilogram.
Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) put it bluntly: even the highest glyphosate level found in beer during their 2016 testing (30 micrograms per liter) was more than 1,000 times lower than the ADI. To reach a quantity that would pose a health concern, an adult would need to drink roughly 1,000 liters of beer in a single day. Dietary exposure studies across Europe consistently show that people consume less than 3% of the ADI through their entire diet, including all food and drink combined.
That said, the safety debate around glyphosate isn’t fully settled. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” (Group 2A) in 2015, while regulatory agencies like the EPA and the European Food Safety Authority have maintained that it’s unlikely to cause cancer at current exposure levels. The disagreement centers on how animal studies and occupational exposure data are interpreted, not on the trace amounts in beer specifically.
Why There’s No Legal Limit for Beer
The EPA sets maximum residue limits (called tolerances) for glyphosate on raw agricultural commodities, not on finished food products like beer. For barley bran, the tolerance is 30 parts per million, which is 30,000 ppb. The levels found in beer, typically between 3 and 51 ppb, are hundreds of times below what’s allowed on the raw grain itself. No country currently sets a specific glyphosate limit for beer.
How to Reduce Your Exposure
If you want to minimize glyphosate in your beer, organic brands are your best option, though they’re not guaranteed to be completely free of it. The U.S. PIRG testing showed organic beers at roughly one-seventh the level of conventional brands. Craft breweries that source grain from smaller, non-desiccated barley suppliers may also have lower levels, though without independent testing there’s no way to confirm this from a label.
For most people, the glyphosate in beer represents a vanishingly small fraction of overall dietary exposure. The alcohol itself poses a far more established and significant health risk than the pesticide residues it contains.