"Gluten-Free Beer?" Topic

How do you feel about gluten-free beer?

There are some pretty tasty gluten free brews.

Why?

Dan

I would never bother to try one.
In fact, I was unaware that there was such a thing.

I've never heard of it.

x42

How about … bacon beer! Is there such a thing?

Dan

I drink Diet Dr. Pepper so don't care.

I was unaware also.

..can't cater to every allergy..especially when..the flavor is going to be bad.i;m a Chef and we amend food all the time to Gluten free people.there are 4 types..those that can't have soy or Flour…those who are mildly allergic and take medicine to dampen the effects…then those who can have soy..and those who just use it as a fad diet.Being it only occurs like 3-4 times a week..its not worth changing the menu. I guess you could make rice Beer.

1, the margin is better on gluten free beer
2. Most gf beer is made from sorghum others remove the enzymes
3. They're not all terrible but none I'v Had were worth switching to
4. There is bacon beer 🍺 +🥓 🤸🏼‍♀️

I've recently had to switch to a gluten-free diet due to health issues. Unfortunately I love dark English beers, and I have yet to find one of those in gluten free form, at least retail in the Western United States.

If anyone knows of one, please respond here and help me enjoy beer again.

Hmm. I wonder if there are more people who have an adverse physical reaction to MSG than there are those who truly react to gluten.

If that's the case then I wonder why the disproportionately high concern over the lesser number.

Dan

CC, because gluten gets everywhere and MSG doesn't.

Lol. So there's greater concern about something that gets everywhere and that still affects a potentially smaller number of people than MSG does?

Dan

There is an enzyme that many breweries use (and available to home brewers under the name Clarity-Ferm) that has the side affect of reducing gluten in barley based beers to less the 5 ppm. While they can not sell these beers as Gluten Free they usually indicate them as being Gluten Reduced. I know some serious celiac sufferers who have no problem at all with beers so produced. There is a brewery not far from me that specializes in Belgian Beers and use the enzyme is most of their product and their beers are top notch. There are likely some available close to just about everyone in the states these days. Do a little research and you can probably find something you like in a GR beer. In wide distribution there is "Omission" which are pretty darn good. Unfortunately, most of the alternate grain beers (sorghum, especially) are near un-drinkable in my opinion. Then again, there is still a market for bud light; the reasoning behind totally escapes me.

Does malt have much gluten any way? My wife who is pretty intolerant of it doesn't get bothered by beer. Bread/pasta kills her.

CC, gluten is a very real problem for more than just a few people. It has been misdiagnosed for many, many years. This is not a fad for everyone and maybe not that many. Your wheat of today is not the same wheat our ancestors ate, nor eaten in the same quantities.

Black Cavalier
look for this brewery
link

check this site out
link

Sorghum Beer is what the Zulus and Matebele drank…

I did a brewery in Pa that has gluten free beer
blueprintbrewco.com
I'm not primarily a beer drinker but like their selection, have tried many of their selection

Never heard of it. I didn't even knew there was gluten in bear.

The next thing they will come up with is alcohol free beer.

Know a guy who is apparently allergic to hops (as he can drink the hard stuff just fine, but beer messes him up quickly), and another who switched to ciders because beer doesn't react well with his digestion.

Also know two women who are non-Celiac gluten sensitive. Soy sauce is fine for one but not the other, and both had to get away from standard breads.

I know wayyyy more people who are truly allergic to peanuts (nuts in general) than those who are truly gluten-intolerant. And peanut allergies can become lethal in minutes!

Yet I don't see the attack against the peanut/nut industry being anywhere near as aggressive as the one I see being directed from all sides at our grain industry. You'd think there was something more behind it, driving this campaign.

Dan

Cc, I don't see any so called "attack"on the wheat industry, I think you are building a strawman to blowdown.

The head brew master at Blueprint had family members who couldn't have gluten thats why he made gluten free beer.

Alcohol free beer?
Like that's going to happen!

"I don't see the attack against the peanut/nut industry being anywhere near as aggressive"

Because the drive to label packaged foods to avoid death by peanut was swift, and remains in place to this day, while the less deadly celiac and non-celiac gluten sensitivity are having to fight for traction.

I disagree that there has been a problem getting things labeled gluten free. I have seen (and made fun of) many grocery items labeled as "gluten free" that don't have gluten to start with … bacon being the most recent example.

The problem is not an "attack on the wheat industry", but rather an attack on people's long term health. Gluten sensitivity is pretty much impossible to diagnose due to the wide range of symptoms (Celiac also has this issue, but there is a lipid test for it) according to the World Gastrointestinal Organization, at least from their last reports a couple months ago (three? four?).

That doesn't mean it's not real, that just means it is difficult to tell the difference between sensitivity to gluten and other causes of the same symptoms that may stem from similar, but not the same, causes.

If you need to cut something out of your diet because it will have serious adverse effects on your health, especially acute effects, then that can be better than the long-term ill effects of cutting it out of your diet. Glutens, however, exist in lots of foods, so if you don't need to cut out gluten, but something more specific, cutting out gluten can be an overreaction that is not worth the extra long-term ill effects that you didn't need to take on.

F'r'ex, if you develop a late in life allergy to poppy seeds, which you have on poppy seed bagels a couple times a week, cutting out all gluten will remove poppy seed bagels from your diet and stop the adverse reaction you had to them (since poppy seeds aren't a common ingredient in non=bakery foods). But now you've cut out a lot of things from your diet when you didn't need to. And you'll have to compensate for some of them, which generally is not as good as just eating foods that aren't bad for you.

This is a great example of crap science. Something was happening. I stopped doing something else. The first thing stopped happening. Therefore, the thing I stopped doing must have been causing the first thing to happen. That's why in science you don't just wander around looking for evidence to confirm your assumed relationship, you look for the evidence to reject the counterpositive hypothesis.

Also, just drink scotch.

Hard Cider!

We appear to agreeing violently. Peanut allergies are swift to appear, deadly if not treated, and relatively simple to avoid operationally since peanuts are not a universal ingredient. Once the food industry knew peanuts were an issue, making some items without peanuts and labeling as such was, if not trivial, certainly straightforward.

Gluten sensitivity, whether full blown as Celiac or, presumably, as NCGS, is indeed harder to pin down medically since lots of things cause GI upset. NCGS may not even be real, though the idea that there isn't a lesser form of a nasty condition like Celiac seems odd to me. Regardless, the research on yet another form of GI upset continues. That bit of traction seems to have caught, at least.

The second obstacle is that wheat and other starches that contain gluten are ubiquitous in the food industry. This is not *just* replacing your equipment with new and never putting peanuts (or wheat) through it. It is also finding a replacement for your foundational ingredient that nonetheless does all the same things. For gluten that is non-trivial, especially since some of the better candidates trigger other food allergies. The effort I'm aware of took a research kitchen 18 months of outright mad science to make things that weren't hockey pucks, taste terrible, require extreme ingredients, or need exotic kitchen appliances. Very few baking companies have the resources to do that, so most didn't, or found a partial solution and sold it to the desperate.

Like some other social phenomena, the "crap science" (ironically appropriate term in this case) and potentially false association of the two conditions has given the smaller group (the true Celiac sufferers) the visibility to get some of its problems solved. That's not a bad thing.

Like some other social phenomena, the "crap science" (ironically appropriate term in this case) and potentially false association of the two conditions has given the smaller group (the true Celiac sufferers) the visibility to get some of its problems solved. That's not a bad thing.

I am way more cynical than you, so "intentional false association of the two conditions".

Celiac is actually easy to test for, with a standard lab test. Since NCGS lacks such a marker, it just takes a lot of time and a lot of exacting diet control (which most people couldn't "stomach" over a long time) to diagnose. But it's really easy to recommend cutting out an easily identifiable, very large number of foods in hopes that the right one is in the mix. It is a similar approach to the (successful) radiation therapy my father had for cancer in the 70's … if we will everything in the neighbourhood, we will probably kill all the cancer. It probably also has the same potential for long-term deleterious side effects.

The other bad thing is related to the "smaller group" issue. There is an opportunity to have social discourse on the tyranny of the majority. But instead, we sidestep the issue from both directions.

I am also skeptical about the opportunity to not screw people in the long term when we do something beneficial for them in the short term, but don't really understand why it was beneficial.

Or maybe life is like coffee. SWMBO is blonde and sweet and I am dark and bitter.

Also, just drink scotch. Neat. Even if you have gluten free ice cubes.

Whisky always needs a drop of water to let it breathe. Advice from the Pot Still in Glasgow, undoubtedly the best whisky bar in the world.

…cutting out gluten can be an overreaction that is not worth the extra long-term ill effects that you didn't need to take on.

Just read today about a new study that says that gluten does not cause heart attacks, but not eating gluten can increase your risk factors!

Research into NCGS hit a research fork a couple years ago, so I suspect overall progress is slowing down as the available researchers figure out which path to follow. Food chemistry is incredibly complex at both ends of the equation.

Really?! I think someone is totally missing the point here.