Gluten-free beer Tapping into coeliac-friendly ale

IF you visit Edinburgh, or happen to live there, step outside, close your eyes and take a deep sniff. When the wind’s in the right direction and the air is cold and damp, the aroma of freshly brewed beer is unmistakeable. It is an evocative smell, but nothing to what it would have been.

At the start of the 20th century, Edinburgh would have been drenched in beery fumes from dawn to dusk from more than 40 breweries of which only the Caledonian brewery survives. A few microbreweries have sprouted up, including Stewart’s by the by-pass, Pilot down in Leith and Barney’s at Summerhall in the city centre.

This year, a new one plans to open in Duddingston or Portobello with a unique proposition. Called Bellfield, it will be the UK’s first entirely gluten-free brewery. “Since being diagnosed with coeliac disease, the thing I miss most is seriously good, tasty beer,” he says.

“He would get very glum and start muttering, ‘No pies. No beer. Is life worth living?’” adds his wife and partner Giselle Dye. If you are coeliac your gut mistakes gluten as something harmful, and this can cause severe malnutrition unless you radically change your diet. Gluten-free beer does exist, but it is more often a blonde ale or pilsner.

Coeliac sufferers may be only one in 100 people, but Dye reckons the potential could be much bigger with those who are gluten intolerant or who feel it improves their performance, such as Andy Murray.

Supermarkets appear ambivalent, with maybe a solitary line of some glutenfree lager, but perhaps they are missing out. The Beerhive in Edinburgh has more than a dozen such beers and the shop’s Richard Diggle says: “There’s a huge market that has been relatively untapped so far.”

All good news for the Bellfield brewery, although the holy grail of a tasty, gluten-free IPA may already exist according to Diggle. It’s Mikkeller Wish IPA from Denmark, and available at The Beerhive and Valhalla’s Goat in Glasgow.