Gluten Free Beer

Its probably two or three times each year we get asked if we do a Gluten Free beer, we have kept thinking about it… A beer can be described / sold as Gluten Free (GF) if it is lab tested and shows a gluten amount of 20 ppm (parts per million) or less.

The regular way to make a GF beer is to us a fermenter addition called ‘Brewers Clarex‘, though I’m not a big fan of adding anything more than we have to to a beer, not to mention the cost of buying a load of Brewers Clarex when the dose rate is so low that it would be sat around for many many years at the size of brewery we are.
My preferred method is to brew a beer and then get it tested to see where the Gluten baseline is and how close we could get to it being naturally brewed to be GF or ‘Gluten Reduced’. More recently we have seen a few Oat based GF beers on the market and followed that up with some discussion with our Crisp Malt rep we find that they are confident that we could brew a GF beer to hit the targets without the need for adding Brewers Clarex to the beer. Yay!

Barley – Contains Gluten
Crisp Naked Malted Oats –  Do not contain Gluten
Rice – No Gluten
Maize – No Gluten

Here’s our Lab test results, <20 ppm is the target.
I’m lead to believe that <10 ppm is less gluten than the measurable threshold, so basically we are all good 🙂

GreenFlute is an anagram of Gluten Free, all the ingredients are listed on the pumpclip so drinkers can make an educated decision prior to drinking, its also got Citra, Mosaic & Simcoe hops and a healthy Dry Hopping too. Its Unfined and may have a haze. Mega light in colour with a refreshing body.

Recipe Drawbacks:
We had a practically set-mash and mega slow sparge as the mix of malts and unmalted adjuncts in the mash made for something akin to clay, so quite a solid mix! We should be able to mitigate this somewhat with future brews and hopefully speed the brewday along a bit.

Unfined:
Unfined and Vegan; can we make this the last time that someone thinks ‘Vegan’ is a bad thing in beer, in not using finings we feel the finished product has more flavour and more aroma *Better beer* so if making Better Beer isn’t your thing you can continue thinking Vegan is weird, it’s not, it’s you that need to learn a bit more or be accepting of other peoples decisions in life. I’m not vegan, I eat meat, though that doesn’t stop me eating Vegan food… I do not limit what I put in my mouth because of, “Oh! its that weird fecking vegan shit”, some of the best food I’ve had has come from Vegan Food Traders. So suck that up X.