Europe is now drawing a more firm line regarding glyphosate. The situation concerning the supply of beer in America is more complicated.
Europe still allows the use of glyphosate, but it bans the use of the herbicide as a desiccant in order to control harvesting times. In the United States, glyphosate is permitted for use before harvesting on certain grains, and tests have on numerous occasions detected residues in beer on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyphosate does not appear on the labels of Budweiser, Coors Light or Heineken. However, laboratory tests have on numerous occasions detected tiny amounts of the most widely used herbicide in the world in beer.
The complexity of the story lies in the fact that the United States and Europe regulate glyphosate in a manner which is not exactly the same. The European Union has extended the authorisation of glyphosate until 15 December 2033, which means that Europe is not glyphosate-free. Yet the European Commission does prohibit its use as a desiccant in order to control the timing of harvest or to optimise threshing. The rules in the United States are different.
At the moment, the agricultural advice issued in the U.S. permits the use of glyphosate before harvest on some grains; for instance, with wheat glyphosate may be applied after the hard-dough stage when the moisture content of the grain is low enough, on the condition that seven days have elapsed before harvest. The difference matters because a study published in Food Additives & Contaminants showed that glyphosate acts in an unusual way during the brewing process; over 80 per cent of the glyphosate recovered from the treated grain ended up in the sweet wort and then reached the beer rather than staying mainly in the spent grain as do many other pesticides that are less water-soluble.
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The American beer story requires one important qualification. It is illegal for glyphosate to be applied after the heading stage to U.S. malting barley, and the American Malting Barley Association states that its members will not knowingly buy malting barley which has been treated in this way. The Brewers Association also advises that brewers should enter into contracts that prescribe a zero tolerance for grain treated with glyphosate after heading and check compliance by means of testing. It would not be accurate to say that American breweries regularly produce beer using barley that has been sprayed with glyphosate right before harvesting.
However, the wider American grain system is different since glyphosate is still available for use as a pre-harvest treatment of crops such as wheat, and beer may contain wheat, corn, rice and other agricultural ingredients in addition to malted barley. Glyphosate may also get into ingredients via earlier weed control measures, crop rotations and environmental contamination. The most interesting one is the comparison made by a 2019 investigation carried out by the U.S. PIRG, since beers from America and Europe were tested as part of the same testing project.
| Beer | Origin listed by study | Glyphosate |
|---|---|---|
| Coors Light | United States | 31.1 ppb |
| Miller Lite | United States | 29.8 ppb |
| Budweiser | United States | 27.0 ppb |
| Heineken | Netherlands | 20.9 ppb |
| Guinness Draught | Ireland | 20.3 ppb |
| Stella Artois | Belgium | 18.7 ppb |
Source: A report on the testing of beer and wine carried out by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, published in 2019.
In the case of the three large American beers, the figure was about 29.3 ppb, as against roughly 20.0 ppb for the three conventional European beers mentioned above. That might be an interesting point, but it doesn’t prove that American beer as a whole contains 47 per cent more glyphosate. Six brands cannot establish national averages, and PIRG itself said that its testing did not amount to a comprehensive scientific study of the beverage industry. The more recent findings make the situation even less clear.
In 2026 Green America had laboratory tests carried out on five of the major beers available in the United States. Glyphosate was found at 0.63 ppb in Budweiser, 0.31 ppb in Bud Light and 0.25 ppb in Michelob Ultra. Heineken contained 2.93 ppb, which was the highest level of glyphosate of all the five beers tested. The huge gap between those figures and the 2019 results proves that the country of origin of a beer is not enough to tell consumers how much glyphosate it contains.
European beer has not been free from the problem either. In 2017 the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment found that samples of 14 popular German beers contained between 0.3 and 5.1 micrograms per litre, a sharp decrease from the levels which had reached about 30 micrograms per litre in 2016. A peer-reviewed study carried out separately and published in 2020 found glyphosate in six of the 14 German beers, the amount ranging from 3.4 to 35.1 micrograms per litre, whereas eight of the samples were below the detection limit of the method. A concentration of one microgram per litre is roughly equivalent to one part per billion, even though the methods of analysis vary between the different studies.
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It is on the question of cancer that the debate about glyphosate becomes highly contentious. In 2015 the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer stated that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans”, finding limited evidence of the effect in humans, sufficient evidence in experimental animals and strong evidence of genotoxicity. A meta-analysis published in 2019 and conducted by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington found that individuals who were in the group with the highest level of exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides had a relative risk 41 per cent higher than others for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the meta-analysis showing a relative risk of 1.41 and a 95 per cent confidence interval ranging from 1.13 to 1.75.
It is a significant finding, but one that doesn’t mean that having beer with 20 or 30 ppb of glyphosate in it increases an individual’s risk of lymphoma by 41 per cent. The epidemiological studies in question mainly concerned people who had much heavier occupational or agricultural exposures. Further animal evidence has intensified the debate. A two-year study carried out in 2025 and published in Environmental Health found increased cases or dose-related trends for a number of tumours in rats given glyphosate or glyphosate-based herbicides. The authors stated that their findings supported the IARC’s conclusion that there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.
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There is also a major scientific objection. The large U.S. Agricultural Health Study, which covered more than 54,000 licensed pesticide applicators, found no statistically significant overall association between glyphosate and solid tumours or lymphoid cancers, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A similar meta-analysis in 2021 also found an overall relative risk for NHL of 1.05, a result which was not statistically significant, although an association with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma could not be excluded.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current assessment is that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans at the relevant exposure levels, and the European Chemicals Agency has likewise concluded that the evidence does not support classifying glyphosate as a carcinogen. The debate is not over. On August 25, 2026, the EPA published a new extensive review of the literature as it works on an updated glyphosate human-health risk assessment which is expected later in 2026. That could eventually turn out to be the most important development to watch.
Europe has established a more strict regulatory limit on the use of glyphosate for the purpose of adjusting harvest times, while in America such pre-harvest applications are still permitted on some crops. However, actual tests of beer reveal that neither continent has managed to get rid of glyphosate residues and that the concentrations can vary greatly from product to product, year to year and along the supply chain. The question that remains open is not merely whether American or European beer is “cleaner.” The question is whether modern agriculture should allow a chemical to get into the supply chains of food and drink when scientists and regulators are still in disagreement about what the decades of repeated exposure could mean.