The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) has just issued a new ruling on gluten-free labels for alcoholic beverages. Alcoholic beverages made with gluten-containing grains can’t be labeled as gluten-free, no matter what kind of processing they undergo. That means that “gluten-free” can only show up on beers and whiskeys made entirely from sorghum, rice, teff, or other gluten-free grains (and which aren’t then stored in barrels sealed with wheat paste, which is a real potential source of gluten in alcoholic beverages). The language on this point is surprisingly direct for a document mostly filled with legal jargon thicker than oatmeal stout.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued rules in August 2013 saying that foods could be labeled “gluten-free” if they were either made without ingredients that contain gluten or with “an ingredient that is derived from a gluten-containing grain and that has been processed to remove gluten (e.g., wheat starch), if the use of that ingredient results in the presence of 20 parts per million (ppm) or more gluten in the food (i.e., 20 milligrams (mg) or more gluten per kilogram (kg) of food).” But this wording poses a problem for beer and grain-based distilled alcohols. What about whisky, made with gluten-containing grains that aren’t pre-processed to remove gluten but distilled such that gluten never makes it to the bottle?
FDA rules say that “Allowing the ‘gluten-free’ label claim on food whose ingredients have been processed to remove gluten, but not on food that has been processed to remove gluten helps ensure that the finished product has the lowest amount of gluten that is reasonably possible, and consistent with the use of specific manufacturing practices that can prevent gluten cross-contact situations.” And “food labeled gluten-free cannot be intentionally made with any amount of a gluten-containing grain (wheat, rye, barley, or their crossbred hybrids like triticale) or an ingredient derived from such grain that was not processed to remove gluten.”
The new TTB rules extend from those FDA rules. Labels with statements along the lines of “processed to remove gluten” are okay if the producer runs the drink through lab testing demonstrating that it contains less than 20 ppm gluten IF they also say one of the following on the label:
“Product fermented from grains containing gluten and [processed or
treated or crafted] to remove gluten. The gluten content of this product
cannot be verified, and this product may contain gluten.”
OR,
“This product was distilled from grains containing gluten, which
removed some or all of the gluten. The gluten content of this
product cannot be verified, and this product may contain gluten.”
AND explain in detail the process used to remove the gluten. Yeah, right.
The fundamental problem is that the FDA and the TTB don’t think that we have adequately proven detection tools for gluten in alcoholic beverages, and they have a point. There’s surprisingly little published research on detecting gluten in alcoholic beverages. A few studies demonstrate that we can detect gluten in conventional beer and in wines clarified with gluten (see Simonato et al. or Catteneo et al.), but I can’t find any published studies looking for gluten in distilled alcoholic beverages. This looks like a major gap in the literature.
That said, this labelling issue represents in some ways a much bigger problem that the FDA — and the American food regulatory apparatus in general — has with fermented foods of all kinds. We have excellent methods for detecting gluten in food and beverages generally. The FDA is perfectly fine with those methods applied to crackers, or soup, or anything other than “fermented and hydrolyzed foods.” But “fermented and hydrolyzed foods” are different, for some mysteriously unexplained reason.
The US government just doesn’t know what to do with ferments. FDA regulations about refrigeration and hygiene make restaurant foods deliberately left out to grow (beneficial) microbes illegal: house-made lacto-fermented sauerkraut or pickled beets or traditionally-prepared crème fraîche need to be quietly hidden under the table when the health inspector comes ’round. And when implementation of the new Food Safety Modernization Act — which requires that all food preparation facilities be inspected by FDA agents — made its way to wineries last year, inspectors accustomed to touring dairy plants told winemakers that cellar staff should wear hair nets, that crushing outside wasn’t okay because birds could poop onto the grapes, and that dogs weren’t allowed in wineries.
The antibiotic, antibacterial mainstream assumes that bugs are bad, and the government regulations aren’t smart enough to differentiate spoiled = bad from fermented = good. Fermentation culture patriarch Sandor Katz gave a lovely talk at MAD last year that touched on these issues. And thanks in no small part to people like Katz (really, thanks in no small part to Katz; the guy is a fermentation powerhouse, an icon for the movement, and one of my veritable heroes), foodie activists are fighting in small, quiet ways against the bacteria-are-bad mainstream and building a strong counter-culture capable of recognizing that refrigeration is one of many good and useful ways of dealing with food. One of many, also including pickling by lactic fermentation, salting, drying, alcoholic fermentation, distilling, smoking, canning, and I’m probably missing something.
Our food regulation issues go beyond bartenders wearing gloves to mix Sazeracs. Food safety is good; I’m delighted to know that the flour I buy hasn’t been bulked up with talc. But as a culture, we need to reevaluate what defines “safe.” We need to find our cultural memories of foods that, as Katz says, inhabit that “creative space between fresh food and rotten food where most of human culture’s most prized delicacies and culinary achievements exist.” And the FDA and TTB need to catch up.
The Wine-o-scope 