beer column
my notes from tuesday's beer column on cbc radio's on the coast topic: gluten-free beers A couple of weeks ago I answered a listener’s question about wheat-free beer. Today I'd like to take you a little further down that road and talk about gluten-free beers. The four basic ingredients in beer are barley, water, hops and yeast. Barley has gluten in it, so all beers following the Bavarian purity law will have gluten in them. Wheat is present in beers when called for by the recipe, such as in wit beers and hefeweizens, or sometimes as an adjunct. If you have a wheat intolerance you’ll have to be careful to choose pure beers to avoid wheat. If you are gluten intolerant though, you will have to find a gluten-free beer. Gluten is a protein complex found in wheat (including kamut and spelt), barley and rye. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease where the surface of the small intestine that absorbs nutrients from food is damaged by gluten. It seems that m...