99 gluten-free beers: what a decade of celiac drinking taught me

I just tried my 99th unique gluten-free beer.

I should have written something back when I was first diagnosed with celiac disease in 2013. At the time the landscape was different and the options were few and far between. The TTB had not yet ruled on labeling beer gluten-free, and I spent the first year or so primarily drinking Omission and other “crafted to remove gluten” beers. After the ruling I decided to stick to only beer made with no gluten-containing ingredients — only those beers that could be labeled gluten-free, at least in the US. If that distinction is new to you, it is the single most important thing to understand about this category, and I wrote it up in the gluten-free beer guide.

The first truly gluten-free beers I tried were T’weasonale, New Grist Pilsner Style Ale, Redbridge, and various Belgian beers from Green’s. These mostly filled the void in those early days, but something was missing.

I was fortunate to have experienced the craft beer revolution first-hand in early-to-mid 2000s Philadelphia after graduating college. Places like Standard Tap and Monk’s Cafe had new, awesome beers to try with each visit. Later, my love of beer took me to Russian River in California and Cantillon in Belgium, where I got to drink some of the best beer in the world. That feeling of adventure and exploration is what I was missing post-diagnosis.

Fortunately I stumbled on a bottle of Harvester Pale Ale at a small shop in Vermont while on vacation. After trying it I went back and bought everything they had. I learned the brewery had several styles and was pushing the limits of what gluten-free beer could be. That bottle gave me hope and set me on a new adventure: trying as many different gluten-free beers as possible, from everywhere in the world.

Times have changed. That bottle of Harvester Pale Ale is now Inclusion, after both a brewery and a beer name change. Dogfish abandoned T’weasonale. I have had a gluten-free beer on draft at a brewery. And I can get excellent gluten-free beer delivered to my house from across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania thanks to Aurochs. There are now dedicated gluten-free breweries whose entire output is safe for me to drink, which would have been hard to imagine in 2013.

The best gluten-free beers I have had

It is hard to pick a single favorite, so here are the ones I keep coming back to. Each links to my full notes and current Untappd rating.

• Peak Buster Double IPA from Ghostfish Brewing Company — The beer I hand people who insist gluten-free IPAs can't be good.
• Fat Randy's IPA from Holidaily Brewing Co. — Dependable, hoppy, and widely distributed enough that you can actually find it.
• Copperhead from Alt Brew — An amber that tastes like it was brewed by people who missed amber ale.
• Inclusion Pale Ale from Ground Breaker Brewing — The beer that started this whole project, under its modern name.
• Imperial Darkness from Ground Breaker Brewing — a genuinely big, dark beer, which the category badly needed.
• Hazy IPA from Aurochs Brewing — proof that gluten-free brewers were not going to sit out the hazy trend.

What will number 100 be?

Luckily there are plenty more gluten-free beers and breweries to try, including these I have heard great things about:

• Bierly Brewing
• Evasion Brewing
• Moonshrimp Brewing

That is more or less why this site exists. Every beer I try gets reviewed and added, so the next person diagnosed does not have to start from zero the way I did.