|BACKGROUND|

Nowadays, the concept of gluten free diets seems to be everywhere. The beer industry is certainly no exception. Whether it be someone jumping on the bandwagon of the latest health craze/fad diet, someone having a serious ailment, like Celiac’s or Crohn’s disease, or a choosy mom choosing to limit the gluten intake of their autistic kid to see if it helps, everyone should know that craft brewing has been making leaps and bounds in the realm of gluten-free beer.

A few years ago, you’d have been hard pressed to find many options past a few ciders, Dogfish Head’s Tweason Ale (a near-beer made from what, I can only assume, was a fever dream that Sam Calagione suffered during an ayahuasca spirit trip gone wrong), and the Omission series from Widmer Brother’s Craft Beer Alliance (complete with AB-InBev’s corporate tendrils), which technically doesn’t count. More on that later.

However, much like Bob Dylan once said “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”

Whoops, wrong song. I meant to say “For the times they are a-changin’ “.

In most breweries, barley is king. However, given the new wave of conscious consumers, a new field has opened and it’s a buyer’s market. Slowly, but surely, gluten-free breweries are becoming prevalent, to the chagrin of those who can’t typically enjoy conventionally brewed beverages. From Ground Breaker Brewing in Portland, Oregon, to Departed Soles in Jersey City, NJ the movement has gained enough steam to go international, with breweries such as Glutenberg in Canada and Meadan in Israel.

So, those with family and friends who can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor, rejoice! The option to try and do gluten-free brewing at home is not a scary or difficult as it used to be. I mean, it’s still kinda on the expensive side, depending on how you approach it and what you’re ingredients of choice are, but it’s not like homebrewing is a cheap hobby anyways, right?

|WHAT IS GLUTEN?|

Before we even start diving into the nitty gritty, let’s get a brief overview of what exactly this issue is about. Sure, it’s a sexy buzzword that people like to throw around and it can kill some individuals that consume it, but what actually is gluten?

Gluten is a general name for the proteins found in wheat, rye, barley and triticale – a cross between wheat and rye. Gluten helps foods maintain their shape, acting as a glue that holds food together. For example, bread. They entire process of kneading bread before baking it is to help make really nice gluten “chains” that help give the bread its form and texture. Inversely, it’s part of the reason you don’t want to overmix things like pancakes. In an even more extreme form, for the vegans out there, you can actually extract the gluten proteins out of wheat flour and make seitan, a meat substitute of sorts, that’s useful in cooking. Inherently, gluten isn’t a bad thing, unless your body can’t process it.

That doesn’t sound so bad, until you realize how much stuff wheat, barley, and rye are in. Spoiler alert: more than you’d think. A lot more.

Naturally, since most beers are brewed with barley, wheat, or a combination of both, this means that 99% of the time, if you can’t have gluten in your diet, you can’t crack open a cold one after a long day of work.

|FERMENTABLES|

Ultimately, the process of brewing a gluten-free beer is the same as brewing a “regular” beer, minus maybe a few tweaks like a cereal mash, soaking over night, and maybe needing to add some extra amylase to push for a stronger enzymatic conversion during the mash.

Ingredients for GF brewing run a surprisingly wide gamut. While not being anything near a comprehensive list, since my knowledge is admittedly not as deep as I’d like, here’s at least a generous start on the plethora of options for GF grist choice:

Sorghum (both grain & syrup): a common choice, easy to use, but in high amounts can give an unpleasant wine-gum type flavor

Millet: arguably the best substitute for two row, if can be roasted to varying temperatures, similar to barley.

Buckwheat: technically not a grain, but functions similar to one, it has a high protein content, making it a good sub for wheat

Oats: still common in normal brewing, but the issue with not being GF is from cross-contamination during processing

Corn: similar to oats, inherently GF, but unless carefully marked, could also suffer from cross-contamination during production

Rice: while rice solids/syrups might be prevalent in the lightest of American lagers, it’s also gluten free, imparting very little flavor for mostly fermentable sugars, even though it typically has little to no diastatic power itself.

Amaranth: an ancient grain, dating back to the Aztecs, has a high protein content and offers a subtle nutty flavor

Quinoa: a staple in ultra-healthy fad diets, a relative of amaranth, offers a slightly earthy/smoky flavor

Nuts: nuts are a difficult ingredient to work with but can offer a source of fermentable sugars, as well as, well, a nutty flavor. Some common choices are chestnuts, almonds, and pistachios.

Sugars: most sugars are usually gluten free, whether it be cane sugar, turbinado, agave, honey, Belgian candi, etc.

The nice things about many of these ingredients is that, as grains, or at least pseudo-cereal, they can be malted (or sprouted) and then processed like barley. That means you could totally use dark millet and roasted rice to make an imperial stout or some amber rice and buckwheat to make a saison. While there may not be quite as many variations in the grains or many maltsers pursuing this avenue, it’s not that daunting of a task. Many of the familiar terms that brewers are used to exist in these grains as well: biscuit, vienna, crystal, smoked, and a myriad of other usual processing techniques as utilized in the exact same fashion, just with different ingredients.

As I said, this isn’t a full list. Hell, there are things like chickpeas, taro, beans, lentils and a slew of other ingredients that I either don’t know exist, haven’t heard much rumbling about them in brewing, or just don’t know a enough about to put them on this list.

|HOPS|

The easiest ingredient to deal with in GF brewing is probably hops. The reason being that hops are simply flowers and they have zero gluten involved. That means everything is cool. GF IPAs aren’t merely a dream and you don’t have to cut any sort of corners or figure out a work around or a substitution for hops. I mean, you can make a GF gruit if you wanted too, but it’s not like hops are evil and now you’re stuck using gentian root to bitter forever. Do it up. Use all the hops your little heart desires.

|YEAST|

While the whole grain thing is seemingly the most daunting task of the GF brewing process, there exists one other slight issue: the yeast.

You might be thinking to yourself, “what the fuck, yeast is gluten-free!”, and it is – the problem being the substrate the yeasts typically come packaged in. Liquid yeasts are cultured in a medium made partially from barley and can (will) contaminate the beer.

Typically, it’s not a problem. most brewers aren’t trying to go the GF route and it’s super easy to propagate batches of yeast in the same way that homebrewers make starters. Wyeast and White Labs are just making giant ass starters, monitoring their cell health and counts, then breaking those batches up into the packages. Easy peasy lemon squeezee. Except that when you make a starter with malt extract or wort from a batch of beer, that means there’s gluten in solution. Is it a lot of gluten? No, and if you’re only pitching the 40-50 mL into maybe a 5-10 gallon batch, but that’s still enough to contaminate, even if all your equipment was completely clean and all your ingredients GF. It’s worth noting that I’ve seen notes that White Labs concentration falls significantly after fermentation, somehow, and White Labs doesn’t. Since that is mostly hearsay to me, if you don’t need to risk it, maybe don’t? I’m not your mom, so, do you.

Fear not, though, there are certainly options. Dry yeast is usually cultivated on beet sugar, cane sugar or molasses, all of which check out on the ol’ GF meter. That means brands like Danstar, Red Star, Safale/Saflager, and Mangrove Jack’s are all fair game. Although it is gluten free, I might suggest skipping the marmite, though. That shit tastes like death and I don’t think it can actually ferment anything.

|WATER|

It’s water. There’s no gluten in it. Unless you really fucked up somehow.

|GLUTEN REMOVED VS. GLUTEN FREE|

Remember how I said that we’d talk more about Omission later on? Here’s the part where we do that.

Since the whole GF thing is cool and popular now, you also have a new area where people are compromising. They want “real” beer, but without the gluten, since most people were making terrible beers and sacrificing flavor just to have something to put in their pieholes.

Low and behold, man discovered Clarex, more familiar to homebrewers as ClarityFerm.

Clarex/ClarityFerm is an enzyme that helps knock chill haze out of suspension. However, it also doubles as a way of getting gluten out of solution as well. That means that you can brew a “real” beer, use the enzyme, and BAM! you’ve got a beer with no gluten in it. Well, almost no gluten in it. The removal process uses enzymes to break down gluten into smaller fragments that, theoretically, may not induce an immune response in the person who drinks it. It also means there’s still some shit in there that could.

A number of bigger breweries have also jumped onto the bandwagon behind Omission, like Stone, New Belgium, Uinta, and Short’s.

The hard science is still getting done on this one, but the gist of the idea is that if something is under 20 ppm measurable gluten, it can be considered gluten-free, in some states. This means that in some places, Omission is sold as a “gluten-free” product, despite the fact that there are still trace remains of gluten in the beer. For most people who are just sensitive to gluten, this is good enough for them, but for people who are straight up intolerant, that can be a nightmare waiting to happen. I have first hand experience of seeing people have reactions to Omission and similarly made beers. A large problem in this matter is that currently available gluten testing methods are not sufficiently reliable/accurate when it comes to fermented and hydrolyzed products.

Since these beers aren’t 100% GF, the accurate term for them would be “gluten removed“, meaning that while they still could be technically called GF, they also really aren’t.

Just something to keep in mind if you’re truly interested in pursuing GF brewing and definitely a factor to think about before giving your loved one a beer that you’re, I dunno, “pretty sure” is GF.

|”TASTING NOTES”|

As you can see, gluten-free brewing isn’t nearly as daunting as it could seem. Yeah, if you’re really trying to be stringent about it, it’s gonna be a bitch to clean out all the barley dust from your mill. But this isn’t the dark ages – we can make tasty beer that isn’t gonna kill your friends and, if you can’t personally imbibe, know that you too can also be a homebrewer. Live your dreams, seize the carp. Gluten free beer doesn’t have to be shitty and bland.

Hell, even if you aren’t particularly interested in committing all the way, it’s neat to know that there are still other ingredients out the to try playing with. Not everything has to be all barley, all the time.

P.S. – Here’s a list of resources in case you want/need some more information in your crusade against that demon gluten: