Is beer gluten free?

Barley, malted and brewed. Malting is the step that makes beer beer, and barley is a gluten grain, so conventional beer is not a borderline case — it is one of the most reliably glutenous things anybody eats or drinks.

Because of the three-way split on the shelf, which is genuinely confusing and is not an accident of marketing. "Gluten-free beer" and "gluten-removed beer" sit side by side, look identical, cost about the same, and mean completely different things.

FDA — packaged food

Gluten-free beer is brewed from something that never contained gluten — sorghum, rice, millet, buckwheat — and it can be tested against the 20 ppm standard like any other food. That is a real claim backed by a real measurement.

Elsewhere

Gluten-removed beer is barley beer treated with an enzyme that breaks the gluten into fragments. The problem is that the standard test cannot reliably measure what is left: the R5 ELISA looks for intact sequences, and the enzyme has cut them up. TTB Ruling 2014-2 therefore does not allow these products to be called gluten-free, and requires a statement that the gluten content cannot be verified. Both the Gluten Intolerance Group and Beyond Celiac advise against them for people with coeliac disease.

Read which of the two phrases is on the can, because they are one word apart and the difference is the whole answer. "Gluten-free" means brewed without gluten. "Gluten-removed", "crafted to remove gluten" or "processed to remove gluten" means barley beer with an enzyme in it and a measurement nobody can make. The fragments the enzyme leaves behind may still be immunogenic — that is precisely the uncertainty the label is disclosing.

• TTB Ruling 2014-2 — governs the "processed to remove gluten" statement and forbids a gluten-free claim
• 21 CFR 101.91 — the 20 ppm standard a genuinely gluten-free beer is measured against
• Gluten Intolerance Group and Beyond Celiac — both advise against gluten-removed beer