TheWhaleShark
Well-Known Member
So, my girlfriend is gluten intolerant. Being arrogant, stubborn, and resourceful, I decided that I wasn't going to let something stupid - like nature - get in the way of her ability to enjoy beer. Also, this has presented a worthy challenge for me.
After a while, my research pointed me at Brewer's Clarex, marketed in this country as Clarity-Ferm from White Labs, as a possible way to reduce the gluten content in barley-based beers. That would be awesome, because most gluten-free beer is terrible.
So I brewed up 10 gallons, split it into two 5-gallon volumes, and treated one with Clarity-Ferm. Pretty typical experimental setup.
I happen to be a food safety microbiologist, who works in a state regulatory food testing lab. That means I know chemists, and that I can access some really really specialized and expensive testing equipment that few other people can.
So one of the chemists tested my beers using the Neogen Veratox for Gliadin test kit. This kit allows for the quantitation of gliadin as low as 5 ppm in a sample.
The beer treated with Clarity-Ferm was below the limit of detection (LOD) of the assay, meaning that it contains less than 5 ppm of gliadin. Extrapolation from the data allowed an estimated load of 3 ppm gliadin.
Now, this gets tricky, because as it turns out, the untreated sample only had 6 ppm gliadin. You can multiply the gliadin value by 2 to get a prospective gluten value.
Regardless, 12 ppm is way below the threshold that the EU sets for calling something "gluten-free." So it looks like the basic beer is actually ostensibly gluten free.
It's not quite as easy as that, though. The kit used may have problems detecting barley gluten post-fermentation, as there have been conformational changes which may not render the protein non-toxic, but will render it undetectable by our assays.
What I do know for certain is that Clarity-Ferm dramatically reduces the amount of gluten detected by our assays. So I think the next step is a willing human test subject.
There you have it. I need more data, but it seems like Clarity-Ferm may be an avenue to getting gluten-reduced beer that doesn't taste like crap.
After a while, my research pointed me at Brewer's Clarex, marketed in this country as Clarity-Ferm from White Labs, as a possible way to reduce the gluten content in barley-based beers. That would be awesome, because most gluten-free beer is terrible.
So I brewed up 10 gallons, split it into two 5-gallon volumes, and treated one with Clarity-Ferm. Pretty typical experimental setup.
I happen to be a food safety microbiologist, who works in a state regulatory food testing lab. That means I know chemists, and that I can access some really really specialized and expensive testing equipment that few other people can.
So one of the chemists tested my beers using the Neogen Veratox for Gliadin test kit. This kit allows for the quantitation of gliadin as low as 5 ppm in a sample.
The beer treated with Clarity-Ferm was below the limit of detection (LOD) of the assay, meaning that it contains less than 5 ppm of gliadin. Extrapolation from the data allowed an estimated load of 3 ppm gliadin.
Now, this gets tricky, because as it turns out, the untreated sample only had 6 ppm gliadin. You can multiply the gliadin value by 2 to get a prospective gluten value.
Regardless, 12 ppm is way below the threshold that the EU sets for calling something "gluten-free." So it looks like the basic beer is actually ostensibly gluten free.
It's not quite as easy as that, though. The kit used may have problems detecting barley gluten post-fermentation, as there have been conformational changes which may not render the protein non-toxic, but will render it undetectable by our assays.
What I do know for certain is that Clarity-Ferm dramatically reduces the amount of gluten detected by our assays. So I think the next step is a willing human test subject.
There you have it. I need more data, but it seems like Clarity-Ferm may be an avenue to getting gluten-reduced beer that doesn't taste like crap.