Is it possible that distilled beverages made from rye or wheat or barley (i.e., whisky) have gluten in them? Or beer?
A friend won’t touch whisky or beer because she has a problem with gluten, and it got me wondering. I can see how beer might still have gluten in it, but distilled spirits? Not so sure.
Most beer has very low gluten content; maybe enough to disturb someone with genuine celiac disease, but whether it’s enough to bother the other 95% with “gluten sensitivity” is questionable. (I am excluding heavy, unfiltered beers like hefeweizen here, which do have some higher quantity of grain products including gluten proteins in them.)
I’d suspect that the amount of gluten proteins in distilled goods is vanishingly small. But then, the whole gluten-free movement is driven far more by faddishness and pseudoscience than by reality, so if your buddy won’t touch a glass of brown, it means more for the rest of us.
She’s got real health problems – I don’t doubt that gluten is bad for her. I just can’t imagine that there’s much, if any, gluten left in something that’s been distilled. Fermented, maybe, but distilled?
If she’s a genuine celiac disease sufferer (CDC: 1 in about 5700 people), then she needs advice from her doctor, who hopefully isn’t a woo-purveyor trying to sell her a special diet. Otherwise, the data on gluten content in grain liquors is readily available, and it’s somewhere between nil and niller for most goods. If she wants to avoid hard liquor, there are many good reasons, but she probably gets more gluten from tainted foods than she would from a Jack and Coke.
ETA: If, OTOH, she’s a self-diagnosed or woo-diagnosed “gluten sensitivity sufferer” (1 in 100, according to those who sell gluten-free products)… maybe a medical workup would be in order to make sure she’s actually sick from what she thinks she’s sick from.
The current fad of slapping “gluten free” labels on vodka is part of marketing, not dietetics.
A 2013 article in Journal of Gluten Sensitivity, reprinted at celiac.com, agrees:
Now, some people with Celiac Disease may not feel well after drinking them, and if so, should avoid them, but it’s not gluten that they’re reacting to.
If she actually has Celiacs then she is right to be wary. Just a few gluten molecules will piss off her T cells and restart the whole process. And they don’t put the ingredients on alcohol bottles. (Mexico banned my favorite tequila, Porfidio, because they were putting something really bad in it, still can not find out what). As WhyNot points out cheap vodka is safe, just ethanol and water.
But I am with the Barbarian. 99 times out of 100 people who fuss over gluten are just being stupid. Unless there is a positive test for Celiac antibodies, I do not believe.
Also of interest, the thickener carrageenan really does seem make a lot of people sick. (Kind of like drinking poison oak). And most soy milk brands contain a whole lot of it… which I think might help explain this anti-gluten craze (drink too much soy milk, get sick, blame bread)
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There are plenty of gluten-free beers on the market and some of them taste OK. I have a friend who is a doctor and has Celiacs. She drinks gluten-free beers.
I’m just armchair speculating here, and I follow your logic, but I thought distilling - where we let stuff steam off removed the water but left the other stuff.
How would whiskey have any taste (other than alcohol) if we were leaving all other qualities behind?
Vodka I kind of get - it really is pretty much pure alcohol and water, although I don’t understand the difference between how it’s made and whiskey (mash?) before it’s been aged.
With modern stills, you capture different flavor and aroma compounds at different boiling points. Then you discard the ones you don’t want, mix the ones you want to keep back together, and stick the mix into a bottle or, for whiskey, into a barrel that used to hold sherry. The mix sits in there for a while, soaking into and out of the sherry soaked wood of the barrel and taking on both sherry and wood flavors, and eventually it’s declared drinkable whiskey.
If all you want is the ethanol, then all you keep is the ethanol, which distills (evaporates) out somewhere in the middle of the process.
No one wants to keep the gluten, which handily doesn’t evaporate near the evaporation point of ethanol.
With older or simpler stills, you have less control over the separation and capture of these compounds, which is how you sometimes end up with methanol in moonshine.
Not to second guess the genuine medical expertise that goes into diagnosing and treating celiac disease and its kin, but I’d still bet that the gluten content of most beers (especially the lighter American-style beers that are part or wholly rice-based) is lower than trace gluten content in many foods sufferers eat without problems.
(Not being personal or specific here, but an M.D. does not automatically confer infallibility or omniscience or even complete insularity from woo-woo… examples abound.)
I’d be surprised if gluten can evaporate at all under any normal conditions. At the very least, I would expect its evaporation point to be well above the evaporation point of water, or the point where gluten hydrolyzes into a mix of harmless amino acids.
My company had a beer tasting with a local microbrewer. Their rep said that although barley is the primary grain (and barley on the list for celiac’s to avoid) many brewers add some wheat because it tends to smooth the taste.
I realize that “many” and “some” are not that precise and it was just one anecdote. For normal beer to be safe for Celiacs you’d have to assume that all of the proteins in question were either changed by the fermentation process or filtered out.
Get 'er hot enough quick enough and anything will evaporate. 
But yes, while I’m too lazy to look it up, I suspect it’s going to be somewhere after the evaporation point of the glass that makes up the still. 
Might be useful information for those with a specifically wheat allergy, but since barley contains gluten too, it’s a distinction without a difference for those with Celiac Disease.
I am skeptical but I have read online where people are concerned about gluten from paste used in making oak barrels that are then used to age otherwise gluten free stuff. I would think for that to be a problem you’d have to have such a low sensitivity threshold that you’d be constantly bothered by things in the environment.
That assumes that the smallest trace of gluten proteins affect even severe sufferers, which I don’t believe is medically supported.
I’m not an expert on celiac disease but I am fairly informed on allergies and other sensitivities, and none of them - not even the most severe peanut allergy - has a threshold of zero. A quick check shows that most clear beers of moderate strength have gluten levels of 20-30ppm; that’s lower than many foods that use some grain component or are even “produced in a facility that processes wheat products.”
Also addressed in this article:
Summary: the wines they tested were clear for gluten at the lowest level our current tests will test for (<5ppm)
Those with Celiac Disease are recommended to choose foods under 20ppm. That’s the threshhold for being able to label something “gluten free”. Of course, one must use some common sense. I would not suggest drinking a beer with 19ppm while eating a chocolate bar with 18ppm and snacking on a bar snack with 17ppm. Y’know, math. It adds up. And since we don’t know how far under 20ppm “gluten free” foods and drinks are, if you’ve got Celiac…well, better safe than doubled over in pain in the bathroom knowing you’ve just raised your risk of colon cancer, dermatitis herpetiformis and diabetes by getting glutened.
Sticking with mostly naturally gluten free foods (including distilled alcohol in moderation) is probably wiser than choosing a lot of things which have to be confirmed gluten free in the laboratory.
Of course it does, and it varies with the individual. But there are many dietary diseases - including obesity - in which the individual must watch and balance dietary options. Even severe diabetics can have a dish of ice cream now and then - as long as they watch everything else they eat that cycle.
I suggest, most gently, that the gluten-free movement is 95% panic and woo and that even the small percentage of those with genuinely-diagnosed and serious gluten issues can be a lot more relaxed about it than popular, self-interested and marketing-driven whizzdom dictates.
Very true. But I’m not discussing the self diagnosed or diet-fadders in this thread, as the OP didn’t ask about them. I’m discussing the ADA’s recommendations for those with Celiac Disease. The ADA doesn’t say, “It varies,” the ADA says, don’t eat foods with more than 20ppm of gluten in them.
People with Celiac Disease *cannot *have gluten containing foods now and then, as a diabetic can have ice cream now and then. People with Celiac Disease must completely eliminate gluten from their diet for the rest of their lives. It’s the only treatment.
Yeah. But, I think the less than 20ppm number has more to do with laboratory equipment, than with some safety threshold. People with bad Celiacs should never eat gluten in any amount (an auto immune disease not an a allergy and it only molecule + one T helper cell could start a cascade). But lab equipment is only so sensitive, and 20ppm is about as low as as it is practical to go. In other words, less than 20ppm really means ‘gluten free, as far as we can tell’
Which is why some with the disease have a tough time. Unless you grow and process all you own food, it is impossible to avoid gluten altogether.