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*292 REPORT Or THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 
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DETECTION OF ADULTERATION. 
Probably there is no one article of daily consumption that has been 
so often subject to suspicion of adulteration or sophistication as beer. 
Its complex composition and peculiar nature have deceived people 
into making all sorts of charges against its purity, but experience has 
failed to establish the truth of by far the greater majority of these 
charges; and the facts of many published analyses show that it is as 
free from adulteration as most other articles of consumption, and 
more so than some. Here comes in the question, so difficult to an- | 
swer in this country, of what constitutes adulteration or sophistica- — 
tion of an article of food. The definition of what shall constitute a 
pure malt liquor is hard to settle. Even in Kurope, where a much 
stricter supervision is kept over food-stuffs than here, the definition 
varies widely. In Bavaria, where more beer per capita is consumed 
than in any other country, the laws limit the materials from which 
it is made to barley, malt, hops, yeast, and water, while in England 
the comprehensive definition has been given to beer as being ‘‘a fer- — 
oD 
mented saccharine infusion to which a wholesome bitter has been 
added.” 
SUBSTITUTES FOR MALT, 
A great deal has been said, pro and con, on the subject of the pro- 
priety of the use of other matter than malted barley as a source of 
saccharine material for brewing purposes. There may be said to be 
three ways of substituting saccharine material. First, other grain 
may be used for malting; second, unmalted starchy matter, that is, 
whole grain, may be added to the malt before it is mashed, the latter 
being diluted, as it were, for the diastase in the malt has converting 
ower sufficient for considerably more starch than is contained in 
itself; third, the saccharine matter may be supplied already con- 
verted, as in commercial starch sugar, or glucose, cane sugar, in- 
verted cane sugar, etc. Of these different substitutes the third class 
is probably the more objectionable, as beer brewed from such sac-_ 
charine matter is lacking in various constituents derived from the 
grain, which are important additions to its nutritive power, namely, 
the phosphatic salts and the nitrogenous bodies. 
In much the same way would bread made from starch alone be 
lacking in nutritive value. 
SUBSTITUTES FOR HOPS, 
The nature of the bitterg@used in beer has long been the target to- 
wards which public suspicion is directed, and nearly every substance 
known possessing a bitter taste has been enumerated among the adul- 
terations of beer, from poisonous alkaloids, such as strychnine and 
picrotoxine, to harmless or quasi-harmless bitter roots and woods, such 
as quassia, gentian, etc. Complete and exhaustive schemes of anal-- 
5 
ysis have been compiled, such as Dragendorff’s, Ender’s, etc., for 
the detection and isolation of such foreign bitters. Either these 
methods of investigation are faulty or difficult of manipulation, or 
the use of foreign bitters is very much less prevalent than is gen- 
erally supposed, for the cases where such bitters have been detected 
and isolated are very scarce in chemical literature. In fact, Elsner,- 
a German authority on food adulterations, goes so far as to say that 
there has never been a case where the existence of a foreign bitter in 
a 
