Gluten Free IPA

Several years ago, I discovered that I needed to remove gluten from my diet. That is harder than it sounds, as gluten is added to everything. The local supermarket chain adds it to their house-brand coleslaw and potato salad in the form of "modified food starch." I guess it is even cheaper than corn starch as a thickening agent.

As you can imagine, this created a problem when it came to beer, which is a wheat or barley product. The early brands available convinced me to drink hard cider, and whisky on those occasions when people were drinking.

This week I'm back on the Stone Delicious Double IPA. The regular Stone Delicious IPA is easy to find, but of the 3 they are still producing, it is my least favorite. Their gluten free gluten reduced^‡ Hazy IPA is my favorite. Which ever one you try, the one thing Stone gets right, is the head on GF beer and ale. Some of it comes out of the can or bottle looking like apple cider. Stone holds a proper head. (Though the image I picked from the website doesn't show that.)

‡ Some of the beer and ale are brewed with gluten free ingredients. Quite of few of them add an enzyme to remove gluten at some point during the whole process. That 2nd option is what Stone does, but they can't claim to be gluten free, even though they meet the Celiac organization's metrics.

Gluten Free Beer

Several years ago, I discovered that I needed to remove gluten from my diet. That is harder than it sounds, as gluten is added to everything. The local supermarket chain adds it to their house-brand coleslaw and potato salad in the form of "modified food starch." I guess it is even cheaper than corn starch as a thickening agent.

As you can imagine, this created a problem when it came to beer, which is a wheat or barley product. The early brands available convinced me to drink hard cider, and whisky on those occasions when people were drinking.

Stone Brewing, out of California, has several options of "gluten reduced" offerings. They can't claim gluten free status, because they employ a brewing process to remove the gluten via fermentation, but they meet the  Celiac  recommendations. (Or they have, whenever I actually checked the numbers.) But they have been hard to come by in Ohio recently for reasons known only to the gods of logistics.

I have always maintained that the very best gluten free offering is "Space Rock" from Short's Brewing in Michigan. But they are a craft brewery, and they produce extremely limited quantities. I have not seem "Space Rock" in a number of years.

So the lack of Stone, has caused me to try some other options. Some of them are good, if a bit expensive. But this weekend I tried Daura Damm's gluten free reduced IPA. Daura Damm's lager has been a staple in the gluten free beer arena for a while, but I've only seen their IPA recently, and had not tried it. Until this weekend.

Is it the best gluten free beer/IPA/whatever of all time? No. But it is solid. It holds a decent head (which GF beers struggle with) and it tastes like a real IPA. If you need to eliminate gluten, you could do worse.