Widmer’s Omission Project aims to cash in on the gluten-free bandwagon with a lager and a pale ale. Here’s our panel’s impression of the lager, which, at under 20ppm of gluten, won’t slow you down or fill you up or agitate what might be celiac.
- Chris Onstad
- Understated, like Charlie Chaplin.
It is impossible not to notice that the beer lacks some of the body provided by gluten, but given the feat of making a gluten-free beer, it is an “omission” easily overlooked. The lager has a good, yeasty scent, a quiet, simple flavor profile, and a little grapefruit-like citrus at the end of it. If you’re after a gluten-free beer that is session-style, this is a far superior alternative to the usual tallboy filler. It has the quiet echoes of a helles, but, understandably, without the fresh, bready sweetness. You would not be out of place drinking this in a Polo shirt, near a clean pool.
We’ll be taste testing Omission’s gluten-free pale ale later today… join us!
The Pale Ale is great. As you said, the body is different but the taste is remarkably similar to your average IPA.
It’s brewed with some strange modified barley, unlike the sorghum used in other gluten-free beers.
And where do we join in this tasting? Sadly, I suppose, at our own address. 🙂
It’s brewed like normal but an additive is put in that drops most of the gluten in the beer. That dropped out gluten and additive is then filtered out. The problem with that is that one of the three main parts of gluten can’t be tested for so there’s no way in telling if this additive is removing all of the gulten…
I’m a beer guy and haven’t gotten a chance to test this one out but friends of mine that are starting a cider business did brew a homebrew with this same additive. It was very good…