Shootin Gluten
To celebrate the recent extraction of gluten from two more of our flagship beers, I thought I’d dedicate some time to understanding what this is all about. I’d never really looked into it before. I’ve probably already got it wrong: was it extracted? I’m going to find out while I write this blog.
A while back, if you walked into one of our pubs, like our brewpub, The Hand in Hand in Brighton, and asked what our gluten free (GF) selection was… it was nothing. The customer either went somewhere else, or chose a drink they didn’t really want. This was happening more and more. Disappointing for them. Disappointing for us.
You could say we should have bought-in a guest GF beer, but we’re a brewpub, we make our own beers - our entire draft beer line-up is our own (aside from the rare interesting guest beer. We have a lovely one from Abyss brewery on at the Hand right now, alas not GF). But it made us really want to find a solution so that we could offer GF ourselves.
In 2022, we made our multi-award-winning ‘Low-Mile’ Lager, 795, gluten free, which made a number of my lager-loving friends and customers very happy. But we wanted to broaden our GF offering by extending it to our pale ales. So we did. Our multi-award-winning Original Pale ale, Shaka, and David Shrigley’s Grapefruit Pale Ale, Toadlicker, are now both gluten free.
It’s a mystery to me how the brew team did it, so I asked for an explanation that I could include in our trade and consumer mailers. They said:
“Gluten free beer production is increasingly common in the UK thanks to an enzyme already used in the industry. Brewers Clarity has long been used to prevent haze formation in beer and in recent years has been found to lower gluten levels enough to enable beer to satisfy the ‘gluten free’ requirements.
It has no impact on flavour or quality of the beer so it was an easy decision to incorporate it into some of our core range beers. Every batch is also tested using an accredited laboratory prior to the beer being released to ensure it meets the standards to be labelled gluten free.”
Great, but why do we need gluten free beer? Why are people asking for it? Who’s all this for?
In short, gluten is a naturally occurring protein found in wheat and other grains. Our bodies don’t completely break gluten down, and for some people, this undigested gluten can cause significant issues, like celiac disease - an autoimmune response. Basically, it damages the small intestine. That doesn’t sound good, and probably not worth it just for a beer.
Beer uses wheat, rye, barley, oats and more. It’s apparently not in oats, but oats are often processed with other gluten-containing ingredients, so it’s in the same camp.
So there are levels of tolerance for gluten. For some, it’s not tolerated at all - it’s extremely painful and can have all sorts of horrible side-effects like osteoporosis and chronic anaemia among others. For some, it’s going to affect their digestion and everything that comes after that. For some, it’s uncomfortable, leaving people feeling bloated.
Whatever level of tolerance people have, they should still get to drink great beers. If these new techniques are becoming easier, cheaper and don’t impact the flavour, we should just do it, right?
So why don’t we just make all our beers gluten free?
My co-founder, Jack Tavare, told me why: “it’s mainly the higher proportion of wheat and oats in our other beers. Lower abv beers with simpler recipes are often low in gluten anyway, so getting them gluten free is fairly easy. For beers with higher proportions of wheat and oats, it's much harder, and we would potentially need to look at filtration for them.”
And that’s all possible. However, additional costs for the filtration process and additional regular batch testing would have to go somewhere.
For a brewery and pub co like us, it’s important for us to have a full range of beers - we say we make “beers for every palate” after all. So as long as we keep looking at ways to make sure we can offer something to everybody, I’m happy.
All our beers are vegan, and now three of them are gluten free! Check out our beers here.