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Looking for gluten-free beer? Your choices may be more limited than you think

Gluten-Free Baking Classics
Gluten-Free Baking Classics

If you are one of the millions of people who suffer from gluten allergy (also known as celiac disease), or just want to limit the amount of gluten that you ingest on a daily basis to something a bit more tolerable for your body, then you may want to read a recent study that came out that did some analysis on one item that almost requires gluten to exist in the first place:

Beer.

Yes, there are many gluten-free beers on the market today, but how many of them are labeled correctly with the term “gluten-free” if they actually contain gluten?

That’s what the researchers who generated the report entitled, WHAT IS IN A BEER? PROTEOMIC CHARACTERIZATION AND RELATIVE QUANTIFICATION OF HORDEIN (GLUTEN) IN BEER set out to find out.

And what they found wasn’t exactly good.

They studied 60 different beers that were all labeled as being “gluten free”, and what they found were that just eight of the beers tested could qualify for the gluten-free seal-of-approval.

That’s just 13% of the beers tested.  Not even 1/4 of those beers made the cut.  

They even found that two of the beers that were labeled as being “low gluten” actually contained as much gluten as a regular beer.

That has got to be either a bad batch of beer, or somebody was really off their rocker in the marketing department.

For those of you who were wondering what those eight gluten-free beers were that should be safest to drink if you’re watching your gluten intake, they were:

  • Red Bridge (Anheuser-Busch)
  • Bard’s Gluten-Free Beer
  • Green’s Gluten-Free Beers
  • New Grist Gluten-Free Beers
  • Honey Beer (Ramapo Valley Brewery)
  • Skull Crusher (Ramapo Valley Brewery)
  • Shakparo Ale (Sprecher Brewery)
  • Mbege Ale (Sprecher Brewery)