How Beer Bears Witness: Your Hair Shows Where You've Been Drinking

I know, I know—after the flawless execution of the perfect crime, all you want to do is put your feet up at a bar with a patio and savor a cold one. However, a new study out in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry says that the bottle of Budweiser is just filling your body with incriminating evidence. It's no secret that traces of what you consume can end up in your hair (hence hair-based drug tests). The researchers wanted to know if they could find a signature in those traces that would show not just what you've been using, but also where it came from. So they traveled to a bunch of different U.S. cities and tested out a few of America's favorite beverage products—Budweiser, Coke, and bottled water—to see if their chemical fingerprints matched up with the fingerprint of the local water supply.