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Most alcoholic beverages (such as beers and wines) don't list the ingredients or nutritional information. Why is this? Is there a special exception for alcoholic beverages?

bipbop1
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    Not speaking for Canada, but in other countries (e.g. EU) there is a specific exemption. Are you asking why or how alcohol was exempted and what reasons were offered for this, etc, or do you just want a citation of the appropriate rule in Canada? – Stuart F May 22 '23 at 08:44
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    @StuartF It depends on the beverage: Beer in Germany has an ingredient list (Wasser, Gerste, Hopfen - water, barley, hops) while wine only offers its grape type (e.g. chardonnay). Spirits like Vodka or whiskey generally have neither ingredients nor food values but alcohol content - but whiskey does often offer some descriptor how they might taste like or how they are made (e.g. storage in these or those barrels) and gins do usually advertise with the choice of their botanicals... it'S tricky. – Trish May 22 '23 at 08:50
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    @Trish my understanding, or assumption, really, is that information such as gin botanicals is typically given for purposes of marketing rather than compliance with regulatory requirements. In other words, there's little point in flavoring your booze with parsley and aging it in sandalwood flasks unless you're going to let people know you've done so. – phoog May 22 '23 at 10:47
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    IIRC in the USA alcohol is exempt because it's under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and not the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). – Sam Dean May 22 '23 at 14:59
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    @Trish wine is supposed to be made entirely from grapes, so it does list its ingredients. See the 1980s Austrian wine scandal for what happens with violators. – jwenting May 23 '23 at 07:24
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    @SamDean It still boggles me that those are all one department. Alcohol and Tobacco go together, as do Firearms and Explosives, but it really seems like those should be 2 separate departments. – Darrel Hoffman May 23 '23 at 15:08
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    @jwenting but don't forget country wines AKA fruit wines. They're not common commercially but (apart from making them) I've bought them in the UK. They don't have an ingredients list, but if they did it would typically have to include sugar and water as well as the fruit juice. – Chris H May 24 '23 at 08:18

2 Answers2

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Is there a special exception for alcoholic beverages?

Yes

Standardized alcoholic beverages (those with compositional standards in Division 2 of the FDR such as beer, wine, rum and bourbon whiskey) are exempt from the requirement to show a list of ingredients on the label [B.01.008(2)(f), FDR].
This also applies to icewine which, in addition to meeting the prescribed standard in Volume 8 of the Canadian Standards of Identity document, also needs to meet the wine standard in Division 2 of the FDR.

But this only applies to standardized alcohol (as laid out in B.02 of the Food and Drugs Regulations)

They are also exempt from the nutrition facts if they have an alcohol content of more than 0.5% :

Beverages with an alcohol content of more than 0.5% are usually exempt from carrying a Nutrition Facts table [B.01.401(2)(b)(i), FDR].

Except in the cases where this doesn't apply (Reasons for losing the exemption)

Nicolas Formichella
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    Is there some motivation to these exceptions? Putting the calory content should actually be useful to consumers and adding things like the sugar or fat content is probably not very enlightening but not difficult either. – quarague May 22 '23 at 09:57
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    I would also like to know the motivation, as it is fairly common internationally (it is the same in the UK). I think it is very important to know how much non-alcohol calories are in a drink. – User65535 May 22 '23 at 10:04
  • @quarague I have a theory about that, to not directly say that it can be nutritious to not induce people into thinking alcohol can substitute a meal. But this is a theory – Nicolas Formichella May 22 '23 at 10:17
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    @quarague I suspect that a lot of the motivation is attributable to tradition and history, but also that traditional alcohol products are fairly standard and their health effects are either well known or easy to find. Of course, this is changing. For example, appreciate beer with ingredients listed because I prefer to avoid beer brewed with added sugar. – phoog May 22 '23 at 10:52
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    @quarague I suspect it has to do with the fermentation process and how variable it can be, especially for small producers. If you go to a small winery or brewery, each batch can be wildly different in terms of taste and alcohol content since it depends on live organisms digesting sugars. Of course larger distributers have this process fine-tuned, but it would be very difficult to require that information for smaller companies. – David K May 22 '23 at 14:10
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    @phoog most alcohol consists almost entirely of sugar. Some of grain based and some of fruit based but alcohol is a sugar based drink. – Neil Meyer May 22 '23 at 14:17
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    @NeilMeyer without getting into a debate about the sugar content of various alcoholic beverages, refined sugar is not a traditional ingredient in beer and I prefer beer that is brewed without it. – phoog May 22 '23 at 14:23
  • You boil the sugar out of the grains in the first step in beer making. It is a grain based sugar unlike sugar cane. If you taste the wort before you add the hops it taste sweet. – Neil Meyer May 22 '23 at 14:26
  • @NeilMeyer Beer brewed is usually brewed only from malt sugar (maltose) which contains no fructose or lactose. Both change the flavor and fructose must be processed by the liver. – JimmyJames May 22 '23 at 14:28
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    @NeilMeyer and if you add refined sugar, it's even sweeter and results in a beer that I don't prefer. – phoog May 22 '23 at 14:28
  • @NeilMeyer Also fructose ferments more slowly and beers are not typically fermented for very long. – JimmyJames May 22 '23 at 14:33
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    I could also see a possibility that it started with not listing the ingredients because purveyors of an exclusive beverage (and alcohol can get very pricey) might claim it's a matter of trade secrets (never mind that they could probably list "natural flavors") and probably evolved into "We don't want to tell consumers that our $120 vodka and our $7 vodka has the same stuff in it". – SCD May 22 '23 at 16:48
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    @phoog actually the sugars added ferment nearly completely and the end result is a less sugary beer for a given alcohol level. Grains leave about 30 percent sugar in the beer, cane sugar or honey leave about 1 to 5 percent. Of course they can leave it sweet as I style choice, not that's completely unrelated to adding sugar. This is why meads can be extremely dry despite the initial product being entirely sugar. – eps May 22 '23 at 17:26
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    @eps as I said, I do not want to get into a debate about the sugar content of any alcoholic beverage. I find that beers listing sugar among their ingredients taste like candy, which is not an experience that I like in a beer. Whether that is caused by actual sugar remaining in the final product or by something else is not important to me, nor is it important to me whether this is a conscious choice of the brewer. – phoog May 22 '23 at 19:09
  • @quarague: Food calories are also complicated to apply to alcoholic beverages, to the point of being potentially misleading. How many calories someone actually absorbs can vary drastically—I mean a difference on the order of 100 kcal per drink—based on how much, how quickly, and how often they drink alcohol; and sugar also interacts with it significantly. I think people should be informed about this, but it probably needs a public health education campaign too. – Jon Purdy May 23 '23 at 06:43
  • @quarague what would be a use of that? consumers that do care about their health wouldn't consume alcohol beverages in the first line... –  May 23 '23 at 08:56
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    @DavidK The same could be said for makers of yogurt, cheese, bread, kimchi, or any number of other products of fermentation, but we still make them list ingredients... – Darrel Hoffman May 23 '23 at 15:11
  • @quarague there are moves to add nutrition information to alcoholic drinks: USA - WSJ and UK - Alcohol Health Alliance, a body lobbying for it – Chris H May 24 '23 at 08:21
  • @DanubianSailor I'm not sure where you get that idea from. A lot of people want to be reasonably healthy, or at least are watching their weight, and a lot of people like to drink to some level. There's plenty of overlap of people who would benefit from knowing how many calories are in their drinks. My gym even has a bar, where the food has nutrition information but the alcoholic drinks don't (they only recently added calorie info to barista-made coffees etc.) – Chris H May 24 '23 at 08:25
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    @JonPurdy even for simple foods calorie information is a very vague measure. And individual gut bacteria populations affect absorption (The Guardian reporting on a study in toddlers, so hopefully well away from alcohol, but I read it recently so could recall it) – Chris H May 24 '23 at 08:28
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Beers do list their ingredients - generally malt, hops, water, yeast. They also show the % alcohol by volume. I

Tom Davies
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