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Monday, March 4, 2013

The bare truth about beer, what a bear

So I have been sitting on a post about Omission beer. It is pretty much my new favorite (ok was my favorite till this morning) but I have been having trouble figuring out just how to write about it.

Omission is brewed with gluten-containing items, i.e. barley. But then the beer goes through a magical process that renders it gluten-free, or really very very low gluten. They post their ELISA tests for each batch online. This level of transparency, plus the taste of REAL BEER, made me feel like this was a slam dunk. (I have consumed it 7 times without a gluten-reaction; and my reactions tend to be pretty strong and violent.)

I was feeling pretty great about this brew until this research came out, and now I am looking long and hard about my beverage decision. The guts of the study show that basically the ELISA test (the one used by Omission) is coming up with false negatives. Yup, you read correctly, the test is not consistently detecting gluten.

This leaves me, and perhaps you dear reader, in the same leaking boat. Without legal standards (still waiting on the FDA), and with faulty testing, it is up to each person to determine what risks to take when eating and drinking. What really infuriates me is what about people who don't have access to the internet, or the time to do all of this research and then extra research about the research to ensure they have the facts about what they are about to ingest?!

Is it worth rolling the digestive and long-term-health dice for a delicious beverage? If you are up for the challenge I have 11 beers with your name on them.

Thanks to Gluten Dude for highlighting the research

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