Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Hambleton Ales' GFA

I have a few friends who suffer from Coeliacs disease. I always feel sorry for these poor blokes as they are pretty limited when it comes to lifestyle and most importantly alcoholic beverage choices! Hambleton Ales have released a beer called GFA - or Gluten Free Ale (4.8% abv) you guest it, is not made from wheat or other gluten containing grains.
Moving onto the beer! Its a rather real tasting beer. its not a particularly malty beer, but it does have a nice hop taste and is remarkably similar to a hop driven regular bitter. Overall its very drinkable.

But I cannot find any information on how the beer is made! Is it made from malted buckwheat, millet or sorghum? Is it made from the unmalted grains and treated with amylase enzymes? Or it produced with various caramels and sugars and then heavily hopped to drive the flavour profile towards a bitter?

The first commercial all malt Gluten free beer is an Australian Beer called 'Aztec Gold', which was closely followed by O'Brian Lager. These beers were the results of experimentation by Australian brewers Jim Levet and Andrew Laverty who both independently devised the process of malting Millet and Sorghum grains. I am curious to know if the GFA stems from the pioneering brewing of the Australians or if it uses a different process?

Can anybody shed any light on the situation?


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