FAQ: What's wrong with gluten free beer in the supermarket?

There's nothing wrong with the gluten free beer in supermarkets, although we do believe it obscures your consumer choice when trying to avoid gluten in your diet.

Current UK and European laws applicable to product labelling allows breweries to label their products as gluten-free even when using gluten-containing barley and wheat in their beer recipes. 

They are able to do this by using a simple process of adding brewhouse enzymes to partialy digest the present gluten into undetectable fragments during fermentation. 

Since existing industry tests (ELISA R5) are unable to detect these fragments of gluten, these beers are deemed safe since they appear to contain less than 20ppm of gluten.

We believe labelling should be clearer to promote consumer choice when it comes to health conscious customers concerned with removing gluten from their diet. We would like to see the adoption of the United State's FDA approach of labelling these beers as Gluten Reduced rather than Gluten Free and see this applied across the UK and Europe.