23 July 2015

Shaking my confidence daily

Gluten-free beer seems to be where it's at these days. More and more brewers appear to be going after a slice of the intolerance dollar and, whereas once gluten-free beers were very much a compromise option not tasting convincingly like beer, more recent offerings like Wold Top Against The Grain and the quinoa beer UCC presented at Franciscan Well last Easter, have been closer to the mark.

The latest exhibit is Celia, a lager brewed in Žatec with, predictably, Saaz hops. Organic barley is high on the ingredients list and no other fermentable is named so I don't quite see how the claim of under 0.5mg of gluten per 100ml at 4.5% ABV was achieved, but there you go.

It's an enticing red-gold colour and smells like a proper Czech výčepní: gently grainy with a seasoning of fresh mown grass. The texture is light and smooth though pleasantly prickled, and the flavour perfectly clean. The hops are on the down-low and there are some additional soft fruit esters: a bit of peach, maybe. Really it's quite an unremarkable-tasting beer, delivering everything that most consumers of 33cl bottles of lager want. Good news for any of them that have found they aren't able to handle gluten, then.

Cheers to DrinkStore for the sample bottle.

7 comments:

  1. Apparently you can tweak the mashing to reduce the gluten you end up with even from barley – don't ask me how, I'm not a brewer …

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    1. That's OK. I'm actually not all that interested, what with not being a brewer...

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  2. Professor Pie-Tin2:10 pm

    You continuity is all over the place too.
    I thought that table had been jettisoned yonks ago !

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    1. I had a feeling you'd be back on this one.

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  3. There's a clarification agent which has been discovered to remove gluten from beer. I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but I remember listening to a podcast interview with a microbrewery which was experimenting with it and having the results tested. Apparently they made a wheat beer which had a gluten content below the threshold of detectability.

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    1. The old scientific paradigm that problems get solved by people who were trying to solve something else.

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  4. There's a couple of ways of doing it - I guess Séan is thinking of "Clarity Ferm" (also known as Brewers Clarex) It's what we use in <plug>our award winning GF beers</plug> Works like a dream.

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