Making Gluten Free Beer
How we make MeaninGFul truly gluten free:
MeaninGFul is not made in a facility that is gluten free so we would like to explain how we achieve a gluten free beer in this environment.
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We start with gluten free malted products like Millet and Buckwheat from Grouse malting in Colorado. We do not use sorghum and we do not use any gluten products and remove the gluten afterwards.
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All grains are milled before they ship so we don’t have to run the grain through our grain handling system which is riddled with gluten. Each bag of grain is painstakingly added to the mash tun by hand
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Brew systems are notoriously “dirty” meaning there is residual buildup of material that happens over time. We spend days soaking our system in hot 3% caustic soda and dismantling/cleaning all connecting pipes by hand to assure all parts are spotless throughout the system. Then we run each tank in a CIP cleaning loop with a visual inspection at the end.
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Yeast is traditionally propagated in a maltose solution. We use only dried yeast that is gluten free in our beers. Each beer uses a fresh pitch everytime and we never reuse it. Each MeaninGFul beer we currently brew uses a unique strain of yeast for each style
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Beer is fermented in conical stainless steel tanks and packaged out of brite beer tanks. Everytime a tank is washed, it is also sanitized before filling. This process assures all contaminants are removed including gluten
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Can filling is done on a machine that is also sanitized each time it is used to assure it is free of contaminants like gluten.
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Final product testing is done to assure that the canned beer is below 20ppm of gluten which is the industry standard for considering a product gluten free. This test is a go/no-go test so while we don’t have a quantifiable number of gluten, it is indeed below 20ppm.