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What\u2019s in beer today? Unless you\u2019re a brewer, do you know? I mean, do you really know?

Usually, Western beer is made up of water, hops, a malted grain like barley, and yeast. That\u2019s the standard answer you\u2019ll get from books, articles, even podcasts. There\u2019s even a famous law in German history, called the Reinheitsgebot, which decreed that proper beer could only contain those four ingredients. But few brewers outside Germany stick to that rule 100% of the time.

When we want to get a little technical, we\u2019ll talk about extra ingredients that are added for flavor or some other reason\u2014everything from rice and corn; to herbs and spices; to chocolate, coffee, and the occasional jelly doughnut\u2026hmm, maybe some rules are there for a reason.

But if something else was in there\u2026some other ingredient whose purpose you didn\u2019t immediately recognize, maybe with a name that\u2019s hard to pronounce\u2026could you tell?

Would you care?

Do you have a right to know?

Today\u2019s episode is all about Americans whose food was changing so fast they struggled to keep up. Then beer changed too, so people wanted answers. And they got them. From brewers both reassuring and duplicitous. From temperance reformers and consumer activists with axes to grind, from newspapers acting as little more than gossip brokers, and from state and federal governments mulling over a Reinheitsgebot of their very own.

The name of the game was adulteration, and it went on for more than half a century.

This is \u201cName Your Poison,\u201d the third and final episode of our debut series, \u201cLager Beer, Governing Bodies,\u201d which looks at strange ways public health debates waded into a sea of American lager during the 1800s.

If you haven\u2019t already, check out Parts 1 and 2 of this series, where we explore 1850s arguments about whether lager beer could intoxicate a person, and simultaneous paranoia about whether deadly diseases like cholera could be caused by beer.

As we\u2019re about to see, debates over adulteration were fueled by the same mix of legitimate fear and paranoia, fact and propaganda, and political jockeying that bore out those other issues. But adulteration dialed everything up to eleven.