Beer Can Chicken: Seasoning Made from Paints and Varnishes

Cooking your chicken sitting on a beer can is not advisable: printing inks and can paint can come off and get into the food.

The essentials in brief:

• Beer cans do not belong on the grill or in the oven – harmful substances could migrate from the paint into the food.
• Nobody has to do without “beer chicken”. There are special chicken grills with aroma containers on the market.

When looking for delicious barbecue recipes, good tips are popular – even more so if they are easy to prepare and also come across as funny. The beer can chicken seems to be particularly hip and is recommended in barbecue and recipe forums as well as by well-known TV cooking stars. And discounters have already tried to increase the sale of chicken and beer cans with this preparation tip: The whole, seasoned chicken is placed with the rear body opening over the open beer can and placed in the kettle grill or oven. After one to one and a half hours, the legendary “Beer Butt Chicken” based on the US model should be ready to eat.

Substances harmful to health

In response to inquiries from concerned consumers as to whether the beer cans are at all suitable for this use, we asked the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in the summer of 2014 for a corresponding test.

The result: the institute clearly advises against this type of preparation. The high temperatures, fat and alcohol vapors can cause printing inks and can coating to decompose and get into the food: “It can be assumed that the heat from grilling and roasting releases harmful substances from the printed outside and the coated inside of the beer can, which skip the chicken.”

Some of the other breweries we interviewed only pointed out that this was not the “intended use” of beverage cans and that they could therefore give “no guarantees” or “no recommendation” regarding such use.

The conclusion: If you would rather do without the questionable “seasoning” of paint and varnish, you should prepare “Beer Butt Chicken” or other variants of “drunk chicken” with a special chicken roaster with a liquid container.