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No lectures on beer but a couple of observations following the recent
claim that Michelob Ultra is GF. The company says they don't detect
any gluten but how far down do they test? I'm certain they don't test
to zero. You might ask them this. Also, the grain experts I remember
reading agree that the distilling process eliminates any danger. They
do not, however, agree on the beer-making process.

Here is what one of those experts, Don Kasarda, said when Sapporo
made a similar claim. I'm not sure how old this is but I found it on
celiac.com.

"The reason that this doesn't make sense for celiac patients has to
do with the digestion of the barley hordeins, the proteins that are
similar to wheat gliadins in barley. During the malting and
fermentation processes, the barley hordeins are broken down into
smaller pieces called peptides. It is true that no intact hordein
proteins can generally be found in beer. However, the smaller pieces
of these proteins resulting from enzymatic digestion are often quite
water soluble so that they remain in the beer throughout the complete
processing to the final product. (Remember that beer is not a
distilled product as are whiskey or vodka. Filtration of the beer
will not remove these small water-soluble hordein polypeptides.) A
barley hordein might have a polypeptide chain including 300 amino
acids in its sequence, yet it is reasonably well established by
experiments that polypeptides with as few as 13 amino acid residues
in the chain can still retain toxicity for celiac patients. These
small pieces of the original proteins can (and do) have very
different properties from the original larger proteins. In the strict
sense, Sapporo is correct that there are no more intact hordeins in
their beer. What they cannot claim is that there are no hordein
peptides in the beer that might harm celiac patients.

There is some evidence from analytical methods involving antibodies
prepared to gliadins that there are peptides in beer that react with
these antibodies. It is not proved beyond any doubt that the peptides
in beer are actually toxic to celiac patients, but it is quite
possible that the peptides remaining in any barley-based or
wheat-based beer, Sapporo included, are harmful to celiac patients.
The amount of harmful peptides, if they are present, is likely to be
small, but there is no satisfactory analytical data, in my opinion,
that defines the amount exactly. So it could be in a range that would
be harmful to a celiac patient drinking beer on a regular basis. My
guess is, and I emphasize that I can't back this up with scientific
results, that a glass of beer once every few months would not do
lasting harm to the average celiac patient. By average celiac
patient, I mean those who have no obvious allergic character to their
disease and do not notice any immediate reaction when they ingest
gluten."

I know somebody who took the same info about Michelob Ultra and
decided to drink it. I can't tell you how much he drank but it was
certainly at least one a day and some days more. All was fine until
after a couple weeks, at which point he slowly started feeling bad.
According to him, the only thing he changed was he started drinking
the beer. He concluded that the beer still had a low level of gluten
and stopped drinking it. He got better again.

It's your choice, of course. I miss beer but I'll stick to wine and liquor.

richard

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