Great news for people who prefer alcoholic beverages that don’t contain literal fish bladder: Guinness no longer contains literal fish bladder!
After frequent calls from veggies and vegans, the company decided to stop using the ingredient in their stout – and now all Guinness served in bars is vegetarian friendly.
Isinglass – dried fish bladder in gelatinous form, basically – is frequently used to filter yeast and solids from beer, meaning many varieties are off-limits for people avoiding animal products. Lots of popular beer brands are now vegan – including Budweiser, Carlsberg and Stella – but others – Fosters, Carling and Kronenbourg to name a few – still use the technique.
Unfortunately, the new method only covers Guinness served on tap in bars – but the company has stated that there’ll be a further roll-out later in the year.
“Full distribution of bottle and can formats will be in place by the end of 2017, so until then, our advice to vegans is to consume the product from the keg format only for now,” the Guinness website specifies.
In the meantime, you can check whether the rest of your booze is veggie – website Barnivore has a pretty comprehensive list of vegan/veggie friendly booze.
