Fatal poison used in beer to preserve foam

I hate drinking weak foamed beer. Just a little cobalt, added to the mix, will keep that foamy head high and tight.

But, ... isn't cobalt like nuclear deadly? So why is was it ever in beer foam?

"Although cobalt intoxication has been known to cause cardiomyopathy for more than 50 years, it is usually considered a problem for people who are exposed to the metal in their jobs or for people who suffer from a condition known as “Quebec beer drinkers’ cardiomyopathy.”

Cobalt intoxication? Beer drinking? cardiomyopathy?

Before we get back to the beer, having a nearly deadly amount of a rare metal in your body should be called poisoning not intoxication.

A little cobalt goes a long way. This man had cardiomyopathy; 'nearly deaf and nearly blind; his thyroid gland had slacked off; he had gastroesophogeal reflux; the lymph nodes near his left hip were enlarged; and he had a fever.'

Was he drinking cobalt laced beer from Quebec? No. His hip implant was poisoning him.

The oddness doesn't stop there. The man with a bad hip was saved by a TV doctor with a bad leg. Please read the story because somethings just can't be explained.

But, here's the dope on the Quebec beer and 20 dead men and “Quebec beer drinkers’ cardiomyopathy.”

"The ailment got its name from a cluster of 50 heavy beer drinkers — they downed 24 pints of beer a day, on average — in Quebec City who developed the heart condition between August 1965 and April 1966; 20 of them died as a result. These cases were traced to the local Dow Brewery, which began adding cobalt sulfate to its Dow Ale in July 1965 “to improve the stability of the foam,” according to a fascinating account of the outbreak published in 1969 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

After the case was cracked, Dow Brewery insisted in an advertisement that its beer was “perfectly good,” according to the 2001 book “Brewed in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada’s 350-year-old Brewing Industry,” by Allen Winn Sneath. However, it poured nearly 1 million gallons of unsold Dow Ale into the St. Lawrence River to assure beer drinkers that no tainted beer would ever reach their lips."

A million gallons of cobalt poisoned beer poured into the drinking water. Thank God it wasn't in my beer, Eh?

Medical News Today