Gluten Free Beer - Is it Necessary?

[Scarrfie]

I have been meaning to put a thread up about this for some time, as there doesn't appear to be a great deal of information about this on the internet.

The reason for this is that from my fathers experience Gluten Free Beer does not seem necessary.

My father has suffered osteoporosis because of a diagnosis of coeliac's disease fairly late in life. He is severe enough that once free of gluten his intolerance became acute, one crumb will give him severe stomach cramps for a day or two. But despite this he has no trouble drinking my all grain brews, even my wheat beers.

So it seems to me that Gluten either doesn't survive the brewing process to make it into the finished beer, or is converted to something more benign.

Any opinions from you master brewers? It would be interesting to hear some technical theories, and I would hope that this thread may become a good source of information on the internet to assist coeliac sufferers in enjoying the unconstrained consumption of beer.

[sockmerchant]

A work mate of mine is a celiac. He does have some tolerance, but any more than one beer is seriously bad news for him. He does like Scott's gluten free offerings or this reason

[Greig McGill]

Agreed. Coeliac presents very differently. There's no single symptom profile for it. My mother-in-law has a pretty severe case, but is fine with most beer. Others can't have a drop. I was reasonably impressed with the Scott's beers, but I think without the variety afforded by "real" beer, I'd probaby just give up drinking if I was coeliac.

[Scarrfie]

Some good feedback and very interesting to know the different tolerances. I wonder if Gluten makes it through the distilling process? I guess cider is always an option also? Just not the same though:)

[Dougal]

I've been looking into this recently for friends with a view to brewing something.

Like Greig says there seems to be a wide range of severity in the symptoms of coeliac disease, and apparently even coeliacs who don't experience severe symptoms may be causing themselves damage without realising. Add to this the complication that lots of people don't go as far as getting the endoscopy to formally diagnose it, but the blood test is supposedly not a fully reliable indicator.

I have friends who fall into both camps: diagnosed coeliacs and people who have chosen to eat "gluten free" for whatever reason. From what I'm reading, aside of producing a beer from non gluten containing cereals (of which I've never had one that tasted that good), the other option is to take a conventional beer and add enzymes during fermentation to cleave the longer protein chains which cause the allergic reaction into smaller fragments that are digestible. 

Apparently, lots of beers sold as gluten free in Europe are treated this way, and are considered gluten free if gluten is tested to be under 20 ppm. The States has different regulations though, and these beers don't qualify. The current debate though is whether the test is as accurate for hordein (a glycoprotein found in barley which causes allergic reaction in coeliacs), as it is for gliadin and other glycoproteins common in wheat.  

Here's a link to the enzyme at Morebeer, and to Charlie Papazian's article based on his paper in Zymurgy. I'll be giving this stuff a go next time I do a Morebeer order.  

[Dougal]

Oh, and if anyone wants a test case: apparently Heineken causes no reaction in many diagnosed coeliacs- I presume it's treated with Clarity Ferm or something similar?

[Chris Mills]

The only way to be reasonably certain that there is no gliadin or hordein (barley and wheat protein) in your beer is to test it. There off-the-shelf kits you can purchase to do this, but they are a bit expensive to run (but far less than sending off for lab analysis). Barley has about 1/10th the proteins that wheat have and if you are not using wheat maybe your beer is below the threshold for your father's intolerance.

Unless you are filtering your beer below the size of protein molecules then the proteins will make their way into the beer. Commercial export (long shelf-life) beer is often filtered at 0.5 micron absolute and this removes nearly everything from the beer so that yeast, bacteria and much of the protein is held back.

[Nick Stanley]

Late to the party, but this blog does (home) gluten tests on beer. Worth a look: http://gluteninbeer.blogspot.co.nz/