• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Guiness is good cause it's meaty?

TheNumber47

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
May 24, 2004
Messages
44
Ok heard this one from my brother, I'll make it quick....

Back in the day at the good ol Guiness brewery they weren't in the habit of cleaning their vats (see where this is going now?) so for X number of years the vats kept making their stout unhindered by the hassle of a thorough scrubbing out every now and then. Well finally they decide to shut off the vats for a minute and to their dismay they find all sorts of rats, cats and birds and things stuck in the vats. Naturally they hush it up and clean them out and bring them back up and running but the new brew lacks that special something that made guiness great. So now in order to capture that secret ingredient flavor the folks throw a T bone or two into the brew.

-This is one of my favorite little urban legends running around out there...where the hell do these things come from anyway?
 
its a traditional story about beer. "fleshing" the brew...or tales of putting toads into barrels of Cider...i think its a "putting the aprentice off the scent" type thing.
 
The Urban legend regarding Guiness I heard was roughly that a batch of ale barrels had been forgotten or misplaced and then were rediscovered. The brewery allowed the Porters at the local station to taste it, which they did and they enjoyed it. The brewery then began producing Porters (as Guiness was once known) named after those first tasters.

And it would seem drinking whisky gives you bigger testicles!!!

A MAN'S DRINK

Daily Record
Jun 7 2004
"Whisky makes your b *** s bigger
Exclusive By Craig Mcdonald
SALMON living near whisky distilleries grow extra large testicles, researchers have found.
Scientists looked at the growth of fish living in the River Spey and its tributaries in the north of Scotland.
The area is famed for whisky distilleries, including famous brands such as Glenfiddich, Glenlivet, Tomintoul and Cardhu.
The Glasgow University team found fish living downstream of distilleries were bigger than others in a special way.
One student joked: 'Some of us are wondering if this means whisky makes you more of aman.' Another said: 'We began to suspect some fish were extra big in a certain department. The research has proved it true.'
Postgraduate student Diane Baum, 25, made the finding while working towards her doctorate.
She was working with the Spey Fisheries Trust, who catch young fish for research purposes.
Professor Neil Metcalfe, 44, who is supervising Diane's studies, said: 'The temperature downstream from distilleries is a couple of degrees warmer than elsewhere. Diane found this created salmon with bigger testes.
'The warmer temperatures make salmon grow bigger.
'It does not affect when they become sexually mature.
Abnormal 'We found if they do become sexually mature earlier, they end up with bigger testes.
'We are not sure why this is.' He added that fish abnormal in this way would be likely to produce more sperm.
Professor Metcalfe claimed it was the warmer water, rather than the whisky, which created the special fish. He even warned global warming could, in theory, lead to waters populated by salmon with large testicles.
Diane's work also produced other surprise findings..."

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news

mooks (pouring a wee dram) out
 
The idea of adding meat to fermented beverages is indeed an old
tradition. I am sure I once posted a recipe for Cock Ale, which used
the carcass of a chicken to enrich the brew.

The odd cat, dog, rat or herring would at least give some flavour to
the tasteless products of our stainless-steel kegmeisters.:rolleyes:
 
That's put me right of me pint of Badgers!

mooks out
 
Guinness has a reputation as having a high iron content which may have helped contribute to this UL (although a pint of Guinness actually contains less iron than e.g. one egg apparently), although as others have mentioned the "adds a little body" concept is pretty standard brewers fayre :)

The "left too long but turned out nice" thing is the 'true' story of worcester(shire) sauce.
 
i read on Olde Worldie recepie for Cornish Cider that included a toad...a live toad that lived in the barrel .."so passing the liquor thro its body , so enriching the brew"......aparently the toad was good for about three barrels..then presumably one had to catch another toad.
 
IIRC, Newcastle Brown contains fish oil as a flavouring.

My grandfather used to 'spice up' his scrumpy with a dead mouse, of all things...
 
JerryB said:
scrumpy with a dead mouse

There's a sound microbiological reason for adding animal matter in brewing- it provides a source of nitrogen for the yeast.

Apparently apple juice is lower in nitrogen than beer worts or grape juice, which is why it's more common to add meat to cider than beer or wine.
 
It's my belief that many brown ales, bitters and stouts are flavoured/coloured with animal blood - if not now then certainly in the past. In fact quite a few alcoholic drinks aren't vegetarian due to the filtering processes involved. The less said about them the better...
 
pi23 said:
In fact quite a few alcoholic drinks aren't vegetarian due to the filtering processes involved. The less said about them the better...

anyone who wants more information on this can go to
http://www.vegsoc.org/info/alcohol.html

it was certainly quite a surprise to me, although by the time i found out i had stopped drinking alcohol anyway.

guiness is clarified with isinglass, and so is not vegetarian whether or not they put chunks of beef in it.
 
Thanks for the link, Fluffle, I'm sure I'll find it very useful. I remember a story a year or so ago when it was reported that meat-flavoured crisps were perfectly okay for vegetarians to eat whereas non-meat flavoured crisps weren't because of the animal-product additives they contained...
 
Reminds me of "So&so cleaning product has more real lemon in it than so&so lemon beverage does."
 
Yeah, Guinness contains fish bonemeal products. It has something to do with maintaining the 'head'. I used to know a quite extreme vegan who said she would never snog a guy who had been drinking Guinness in the pub as she might inadvertantly ingest some tiny amount of an animal product. Mad. It would be OK if he was drinking Murphy's (another Irish stout) as it does not contain fish products. Or if he brushed his teeth post-Guinness and pre-snog.

Read a crappy detective novel once set in cider country in England that was centred around a young soldier who disappeared during WW2 while working on an apple farm. Since a lot of the background tale was about making cider and including legs of lamb in the casks it did not take a genius to work out early on that this was how the lad's body was disposed of.
 
Many moons ago I went on a school trip to the Bass brewery and unless my memory is wrong they said they used ground up cuttlefish (sp?) bone (or whatever it's called) to filter any impurities out of the beer.
 
Scarlett said:
I used to know a quite extreme vegan who said she would never snog a guy who had been drinking Guinness in the pub as she might inadvertantly ingest some tiny amount of an animal product. Mad. It would be OK if he was drinking Murphy's (another Irish stout) as it does not contain fish products. Or if he brushed his teeth post-Guinness and pre-snog.

i don't see what is wrong with that, she probably found the idea disgusting more than anything else.

if someone had been eating something horrid, like poo, would you kiss them afterwards? many vegans and vegetarians, myself included, find meat pretty revolting.
 
:(
I have to admit that, having grown up in the states, I don't really know what this "snogging" thing is all about...but hey if anyone here wants to show me that'd would be ok :D (only ladies need apply)

anyhow, I suspected as much...I had known that odd animal products are used in very dubious places just about everywhere you look, but it seemed a tad much to be schucking T-bones into the brew. But I figured that if any beer out there was flavored with big chunks of meat it would be Guiness...not that nappy pilsner fluff.
 
The fish gut product, the finings that are used to clear the beer by settling out the sediment in the final stages, shouldn't really find its way into the final product - I am not aware of any beer that isn't fined like this, except perhaps those cloudy wheat/white/weis beers, but don't ever take my ignorance for proof :)
 
lizard23 said:
The fish gut product, the finings that are used to clear the beer by settling out the sediment in the final stages, shouldn't really find its way into the final product - I am not aware of any beer that isn't fined like this, except perhaps those cloudy wheat/white/weis beers, but don't ever take my ignorance for proof :)


is that going to make any difference to a vegetarian or vegan? it's not the eating of animals to which we on the whole object, but the killing, and unless you are suggesting that beer companies surgically remove the swim bladders of the fish, filter the beer through them, and put the organs back with no ill effects to the fish, then i'm sure you can understand why many of us choose to stick to beers that have had no dead animals involved in their production whatsoever*.

i apologise if i have missed your point, but if you are really suggesting that vegans and vegetarians should be ok with drinking guiness etc because there is no fish in the finished product, then i think you may have misunderstood the 'raison d'etre' of most vegetarians!


*a huge list of alcoholic beverages and their suitability for vegans and vegetarians:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/geraint.bevan/Vegetarian_beers.html
 
James Whitehead said:
The idea of adding meat to fermented beverages is indeed an old
tradition. I am sure I once posted a recipe for Cock Ale, which used
the carcass of a chicken to enrich the brew.

Precisely what a friend of mine brewed - not bad either for home-brew. He baulked at using the uncooked chicken suggested though...

edit: and several wines are filterred through fishes' swim-bladders.
 
(You people all change your avatars more often than I change my shorts...I miss the dancing badger):blah:

Oh and in a thread about Guiness and beer, Im surpirsed no one has used THIS --------> :_pished: yet. Oh nevermind, I just did :p
 
Fluffle I did not intend to criticise or question vegetarians or their philosophy.

It is simply that kissing someone who had been drinking drinking a beer fined in this way is not like kissing someone who had been eating shit as in your example, exactly, as you wouldn't personally be getting the offensive material in your mouth.
 
ok, how about this:

if someone had eaten shit and then washed and brushed their teeth, would you kiss them then? would it matter to you that there was probably not any poop in their mouth, or would the whole idea just gross you out a bit too much?
 
It's an odd question, but I personally probably wouldn't want to get into a tonsil-hockey situation with a copraphage, no, but then I am a bit of a prude. ;)

As a general rule I think people should eat and drink what they like and indeed, provided it is consensual, kiss who they like based on their own personal beliefs and tastes.

So I'm not
suggesting that vegans and vegetarians should be ok with drinking guiness etc
nor anyone else who doesn't want to. As I believe I fairly clearly stated, I simply believe there shouldn't be any fish left in beer by the time you get to drink it.

Edit : Oh and I was surprised to see so many products not using fish-based finings. Is it just cask (real) ale that's mainly made this way?
 
Slightly o.t. but my dad used to drive a tanker and sometimes carried ethanol ( i think) which was used to clean pipes at three breweries.
He reckoned he took (can't remember exact figures) 1000 litres to Vaux in Sunderland, 1000 litres to Tennants in Glasgow and 10,000 litres to Scottish and Newcastle on Tyneside.
My ma reckoned they were putting in the Newcastle Brown, hence the local nickname for the stuff, Mad Dog.
 
Mooksta said:
That's put me right of me pint of Badgers!

Aye, a pint of Brains is out of the question when I get back to Aberystwyth... although what does Old Git contain?!
 
bulldog - ethanol is the sort of alcohol which is in beverages. perhaps you mean a different sort, like methanol, which sends you mad if you drink it, or perhaps they really were putting it in the newcastle brown. :)


lizard23 said:
Edit : Oh and I was surprised to see so many products not using fish-based finings. Is it just cask (real) ale that's mainly made this way?

bear in mind here that even when i drank i never drank much beer, and know bugger all about different types of beer:

real ale seems to be nearly always fish-fined.
i seem to recall that it is necessary for it to be if they want it labelled as real ale, unless they want to invent and test a whole new type of fining. this may be the case for other types of beer too. guinness i know uses a reason along these lines for their beer not being vegetarian.

with other types of beer it seems to be up to the discretion of the brewers.

i wish that more manufacturers would just LABEL their products properly - being a vegetarian drinker involves basically memorising a huge list of acceptable products. i recently found out that it seems that all sainsbury's wines are veggie-safe, but they hadn't bothered labelling them as such last time i checked. now i don't mind if something can't be made veggie, as guinness claim is the case for their products, but it is really annoying knowing that something is veggie but the brewers haven't bothered to tell anyone.
 
To suggest a "list of ingredients" for beer is, in my opinion, just asking for trouble. There are all sorts of "trace" elements in the make-up of any beverage and sometimes ignorance is bliss.

If you're in any doubt, contact the producer or even CAMRA who'll gladly advise on vegetarian beers.

As an aside - but slightly relevent to the thread - my friend worked in a large bread-factory (names available but removed for confidentiality). In his first week a pidgeon flew in through a sky light, crashed about a bit in panic and then fell into a huge hopper feeding into dough. Production was stopped by the supervisior and a hurried discussion ensued with the management. It was decided that the delay and cost of complete removal and cleaning was too high ... so the batch was continued, bird and all! Since that time, my friend never bought or ate any bread from that manufacturer.
This was some years ago and health and safety standards are more strict now so it's unlikely to occur again but it made me wonder...

An ex-girlfriend was expecting a baby but was quite anaemic. Her doctor happily prescribed a bottle of stout a day which she drank despite not liking the stuff (bless her!) and had a startlingly easy birth of a bouncing boy!
 
Stormkhan said:
To suggest a "list of ingredients" for beer is, in my opinion, just asking for trouble. There are all sorts of "trace" elements in the make-up of any beverage and sometimes ignorance is bliss.

you have to put ingredients on everything else, why not beer? most people don't read them anyway.

but what i meant was not a list of ingredients - rather that if a producer knows that their beer is vegetarian, they label it as such. the manufacturers of most other products manage, why should beer manufacturers be excused?
 
Back
Top