Gluten-free beers matter - and you can't tell the difference anyway!

BY HER own description, Becky Carr has been on something on a one-woman campaign to make gluten-free beers more widespread in Derby, and further afield.

Becky is coeliac, so it matters to her, of course. As she says, “I don’t want to be a gluten bore but it makes or breaks a pub for me, determining whether I can eat or drink there.”

Happily, there is much more awareness now than there used to be and many more breweries either producing gluten-free beers or only producing gluten-free beers.

Becky Carr and her partner Jim Rolley. She's coeliac and has been campaigning for more gluten-free beers in pubs.

It is a just over a year since I tackled the subject for my beer column in the Derby Telegraph and things have moved on a good bit since then, which is why it’s a good time for an update.  

“With 10-15% of the population now either gluten intolerant or coeliac it is important – and also important for those lucky enough not to be affected personally to understand,” says Becky.

“It is luck – 40% of people have the genes for coeliac, it’s just a roll of the dice whether it develops or not.”

Let’s blow one myth out of the water for a start. A gluten-free beer is not somehow different or inferior. Most of us would be hard-pushed to know the difference and, as Rachel Matthews, owner of Derby’s Dancing Duck brewery, found when she decided to make her range GF, several of them just happened to be anyway.

Perception, prejudice… that’s perhaps the problem. Rachel started issuing “GF free” stickers for pubs to put on her pump clips. Immediately, some customers started saying the beer had changed… yet they’d been drinking it gluten-free for months already. The stickers vanished and sales picked up again.

This happened in one of my locals and I certainly did not see any difference in my favourite Dancing Duck beer.

Rachel told me back then: “We’d been throwing around the idea of going GF for quite a while but we’d had more and more pubs asking about it and lots saying they are keeping one handpump as always GF.

“We ran loads of tests and had a selection sent off for lab analysis. What we found was that actually the majority of our beers are well below the required 20ppm gluten naturally without us having to do anything. We were pleasantly surprised.”

Matt Willers (left) and his dad Nick of Derby's Little Brewing, who took the decision to make all of their beers GF.

Derby’s Little Brewing also went completely gluten free and brewer Matt Willers provided me with a lot of technical detail about how it’s done which I don’t need to repeat here.

What’s more important is that the beers are available. Becky says: “I've been a bit of a one-woman campaign for improving GF availability in the city.

“I explained to Adam at the Hoppy Place (Chaddesden’s micropub) about why GF  matters and he committed to one handpull being a permanent, changing gf beer.

“I also persuaded the Golden Eagle to keep a few Dancing Duck bottles on hand, so when they don't have a GF cask option there is still beer we coeliacs can drink.

“The Flowerpot, Five Lamps, Exeter, Victoria and Furnace also all make a decent effort and the Last Post is also trying hard now under new ownership.”

“In terms of breweries, Little, Dancing Duck, Brass Castle, Abbeydale, Triple Point are all 100% GF now, and Dr Mortons, Abbeydale's side-brand

“Beers4coeliacs is a great Facebook group, run by the guy who owns the Wheeltapper in Loughborough. And Abbeydale explain it all very well on their website: abbeydalebrewery.co.uk/gluten_free_beers-2/”

How about the difference between GF and vegan beers? While it has a lot to do with whether or not the brewer uses isinglass finings to clear the beer (from a sturgeon’s stomach), here is Becky on the subject:

“A lot of vegan beers do also happen to be GF and vice versa but it is not a given. They can be one without the other and it is so misunderstood,” she says.

“Non-vegan beers are often cleared using finings of animal or dairy origin, whereas vegan beers use either chemical or plant-based finings.

“The confusion comes from the fact that the Clarex enzyme (used for clearing beer) is vegan but that doesn't mean that beers cleared using it are all vegan, because they might contain other non-vegan ingredients.”

It is a big subject but perhaps this provides a bit of clarity. And the biggest thing of all, as I said at the start, is that GF beers are not lesser beers. They might just be among your favourites. A few of my favourites are GF, for sure.

For reference, here’s the article I wrote a year ago on the subject as well:

derbytelegraph.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink/dancing-duck-second-derby-brewery-10120817

• Lots of gluten free beers will be available at a gluten-free festival at the excellent Junction micro-pub in Stretton, just outside Burton, from Thursday to Sunday, June 11-14. GF snacks too, and a GF chippy nearby.

• And there's more! Seven GF and 13 vegan beers will be among the 48 available at this weekend's Belper Goes Green Eco Fest, all from breweries within 15 miles of Belper. That's Friday to Sunday, June 5-7 at Belper Meadows Cricket Club.