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Brewers may claim secret ingredients to make their beer better than
their competitors’, but do they add anything to make drinkers so thirsty
they want to drink more and more? A study to find out has drawn a blank,
but bitter emerged as the one which made people thirstiest.

Trading Standards Officers at Sandwell in the West Midlands asked Erik
Millstone of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex
and Keith Thomas of the University of Sunderland to investigate the issue.
They were concerned that beer does not have to carry a list of ingredients.

‘From our study, it appears that some beers do make you thirstier, but
we can’t explain why,’ says Millstone. Alcohol is a known diuretic, so it
could make people thirsty by making them urinate more. However, Millstone
rules this out because strong beers did not make the volunteers most thirsty.
The authors analysed the beer for other diuretics such as potassium and
sodium, but none correlated with thirst.

Millstone and Thomas report in the latest issue of British Food Journal
that they measured thirst by asking people to take part in a ‘taste trial’.
Thirty minutes after drinking a pint of beer, the subjects were allowed
to drink water to clear their palates and the amount they drank was measured.
On average, people drank most water after drinking Stones Bitter, brewed
by Bass.

Millstone and Thomas later investigated the effect that the nine beers
had on the desire to urinate. Strangely, Stones had one of the weakest effects.
‘The one that made them most thirsty made them (urinate) least,’ says Millstone.

A spokesperson for the Brewers’ Society doubted that brewers added
anything specifically to make people thirsty.