Gluten-free (reduced) Witbier

[Fritzpoll85]

I've mentioned a couple of times elsewhere, but my wife is intolerant to gluten and has been for a couple of years. This was a bit of a downer because she loved beer. She's able to drink gluten-reduced beers (labelled gluten free but still made with barley etc.) and she's been able to drink the few beers I've made because I've used Clarity Ferm.

One of her favourite types of beer was a witbier style (things like Blue Moon as a Tesco-friendly reference). According to the instructions, I just need to double dose compared to normal because of the amount of wheat in it. But I just wondered if anyone had any thoughts like - will this actually work? and would it drop the cloudiness of the style

In the extreme, I'd love to be able to make her a hefeweizen, but it seems too good to be true that I'd manage this without gluten (or at least getting it <20ppm)

 

[Fritzpoll85]

So I emailed WhiteLabs, and they've come back and said they know of brewers making gluten reduced witbier and hefeweizen so it seems feasible.

They offered me the chance to use their services to test for gluten if I wasn't sure! But that did make me also wonder if there's a cheap home kit or cheap lab test so that i can check the outcome of the process once and then carry on using it with confidence....

 

[Kiwigaz]

I would also be interested in this, my good lady is also gluten-free.

 

[Fritzpoll85]

I would also be interested in this, my good lady is also gluten-free.

This worked for me. Two vials of clarityferm and she could drink it with no ill effect. I have had similar success with hefeweizen as well, which had 60% wheat in the grain bills.

Hope this helps - it certainly worked here, but people may have different tolerances. I haven't had the beers tested or anything, but my wife gets ill if she has normal beer off the shelf, but can drink my wheat based beers

 

[Kiwigaz]

Excellent cheers!

 

[phillc]

I've been thinking about trying to brew a 100% buckwheat beer. Buckwheat, which isn't really a wheat grain at all, is gluten free. Weyermann and Castle sell buckwheat malts, probably others too.

 

[Fritzpoll85]

I've been thinking about trying to brew a 100% buckwheat beer. Buckwheat, which isn't really a wheat grain at all, is gluten free. Weyermann and Castle sell buckwheat malts, probably others too.

Yeah, that would be good. Some of the other grains used like sorghum seem to be mich harder to get hold of.