From Craft Brew Alliance & Bloomberg Businessweek:
As brewing giants struggle to sell suds in the U.S., Craft Brew Alliance (BREW), the company behind Kona, Red Hook, and Widmer, said its sales by volume increased by 9 percent in the last quarter and net income almost doubled to $1.1 million, thanks in a large part to its new, gluten-free brand.
In the year-earlier period, the beer, called Omission (get it?), wasn’t widely available, though it now accounts for 3 percent of Craft Brew’s output. The company gave the beer a hearty cheers in its earnings announcement this morning.
The gluten-free market is approaching $5 billion, according to a recent study, with almost one in five adults buying products that specifically aren’t made with wheat or related grains. None of this has been lost on beer makers; they’ve cooked up a number of batches for the gluten-averse, including AB InBev’s “Redbridge” brand.
Craft Brew, however, is particularly sensitive to demand. Its chief executive officer, Terry Michaelson, has been diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder aggravated by gluten. (Imagine if Hamdi Ulakaya were lactose-intolerant.) The wife of Brewmaster Joe Casey has the same affliction. Michaelson and Casey went out of their way to make Omission with barley, the traditional grain of choice, instead of such typical substitutes as sorghum and rice. Omission can’t legally be labeled “gluten-free” (at least not yet) because of the barley, but the company promises that virtually all gluten is stripped out in a proprietary process that gets the beer well under new federal thresholds.
So how does it taste? Omission’s pale ale version earned a score of 80 on BeerAdvocate, an online reviewing site, while the lager rated a 74. A Tennessee drinker under the tag Lexan66 wrote: “It actually tastes like beer!”
That’s better than lots of traditional made-with-wheat beers and almost equal to Fat Tire, a craft beer favorite, which scored an 82. InBev’s Redbridge drewa harsh 64—slightly higher than the 55 critics gave Bud Light Platinum.
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The safety issue with Omission is not just whether it tests to below 20 ppm of gluten, but whether the test the company uses (the R5 competitive ELISA) is scientifically valid for that purpose. The FDA and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau say it is not. That's why Omission cannot be labeled gluten-free.
ReplyDeleteFor more information about the safety issue and about Craft Brew Alliance's PR campaign, please see an article on that topic by the Celiac Community Foundation of Northern California http://www.celiaccommunity.org/confusion-over-omission/