In Memory of Bread

by Paul Graham

  *4 Pretty close: xanthan gum comes from a lab. It used to be derived from a strain of black mold, but now comes from corn. The point remains that I’m not going to find this at the farmers’ market any more than I’m going to find an olive.

  The cashier at Burlington’s City Market eyed me warily as I walked up to her register. I had selected the express lane because technically I had fewer than fifteen items. In my cart were two cases of Omission Pale Ale, another case or so of Glutenberg Pale Ale and Red Ale in pint-sized cans, and a few bottles of Citizen Cider. There were also a few four-packs of Alchemist’s Celia Saison ale, a GF beer brewed with sorghum but cut with orange peel and coriander (in the right hands, sorghum is a good match for Belgian-style ales and yeasts), which I’d grabbed at the last minute.

  “At first I thought you had too many items, but it turns out it’s just a lot of alcohol,” the cashier said with wonder. Her hair was dyed raven-black and she wore colorful jewelry. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and I wondered if she registered the irony of who was lecturing whom about alcohol consumption, here.

  I looked from the cart to her, and then back into the cart. “I’m having a party.”

  “Right on.” It was almost ten o’clock on a Friday night. The beer section was the busiest department of the co-op.

  I wasn’t having a party, though I felt like having one. Our first trip back to Burlington since the winter fiasco had been fruitful. Earlier in the day, we discovered a loaf of exceptionally good gluten-free bread at the farmers’ market. Eliza Hale of Up the Hill Bakery had set up a table toward the end, with loaves in plastic wrap gathered around a plate of free samples: GF cinnamon-raisin, something called “mock rye,” and sourdough. The traffic near the other tables was heavy. Traditional wheat breads surrounded us, burnished and rounded, glazed like beautiful pottery. If gluten contact highs were possible, I would have been stoned.

  Eliza’s loaves didn’t appear to be in such high demand, so we talked for a while, comparing celiac-disease horror stories. She described how she had been experimenting with flour mixes for years before she hit on one she liked, and now she was producing a type of GF bread that was, at the time, difficult to find: sourdough. Eliza would turn out to be the first of several people I met who were working innovatively on GF bread-making, not settling for “good enough.”

  I knew after tasting a sample that this was indeed bread. Her sourdough had an incredibly successful texture, but it was the tang that got me, immediately reconnecting me to the spelt and multigrain loaves we used to buy. When it came time to select some bread to take home with us, the good manners and economy drilled into me throughout my upbringing worked against me. I should have bought Eliza out—should have written a check for $140 and taken home all twenty loaves at $7 each, then stacked them in the chest freezer like cordwood. At a loaf a week, Bec and I could have lived off of them until Christmas.

  Instead, we bought two measly loaves. I thought I shouldn’t be greedy, should leave enough for the other poor celiacs, and all that. And seven bucks for a loaf of bread sounded, at that point, a little steep, even though I was already paying that for the bagged mix. (It doesn’t sound expensive anymore, though it’s hard not to see such a price for bread as more evidence that the poor are priced out of good gluten-free items.) Across the country, the average cost of high-quality GF bread—which is the only GF bread worth eating—seems to fall between eight and eleven dollars per loaf, depending upon location and ingredients. Ironically, most are made from “grains of poverty”: bean flours, nut flours, and millet. In the GF world, everything that used to be poor is now rich.

  A few hours later, I thought better of my actions, and I returned to the market with the intention of buying out Eliza. But she was gone; I found only an empty space where she had set up her tent.

  So I was determined not to make the same mistake with the beer. I had learned about the Omission when my neighbor, Matt, had once again returned from Rochester with treasure a few weeks prior. The Glutenbergs, Celia Saison, and cider all had emerged during a serendipitous beer-and-cider tasting at Burlington’s Farmhouse Tap Room & Grill, which had long been one of our favorite places to eat because it served locally sourced meat and produce. Now we liked the Farmhouse even more, because they had a GF-dedicated fryer. Compared to other restaurants we’d visited, the staff was fantastic; they made substitutions willingly, showing us the joys of rare-cooked burgers on beds of wilted kale with pickled jalapeños. Their variety of celiac-safe beers meant I hadn’t pined—not much, anyway—for any of the other hundreds of beers they stocked. No New Planet. No Bard’s. No Redbridge. Only innovative, inspired brews. I’d left the table a tad unsteady, and with the shopping list I’d brought into the City Market.

  “Actually,” I started over with the cashier, “I’m not having a party.” I lifted the four-packs onto the belt. “I have celiac disease. Where I live we can’t get good GF beer, so when we visit here, we tend to load up.”

  I watched as her face softened. It was the first time that I had ever played the celiac card in my defense: That’s right, don’t judge me, because either I buy you out or I’m drinking Bitchy Tree.

  “It will last a long time,” Bec added from behind me, mostly for the benefit of the shoppers in line behind us.

  “Well, soon Monsanto will be doing that genetically modified wheat so people with celiac’s can eat it, right?” The cashier smiled at me brightly, apparently unaware that she had turned celiac disease into a possessive, like Tourette’s. She went on, “My wife is into GMO and Monsanto. She sees it as a good thing—the problems GMO can solve, and all that.”

  We had a pleasant talk about the loaded issue of GMOs and paid an absurd amount for what seemed a small quantity of beer—not 252-percent more than for all others in the cooler, but about 50 percent more than the refreshing, gluten-packed beers from Allagash and Stone, Otter Creek and Long Trail. Then Bec and I left to load up the car.

  “The only bad thing about this whole damned town,” I said as we drove back to our hotel, “is that we don’t live here.”

  The contrasts in the available products were leading me to see the North Country, which I’d long thought of with pride as my home, as a GF desert. I knew that GF bakeries and even small-scale breweries were popping up all over the country, and I also knew that they would come to our region last. I didn’t want to move, and it wasn’t practical to do so. But I was tired of feeling left out, though for the time being, as long I was within striking distance of the good stuff, I could live with it.

  —

  Talk about letting a genie out of a bottle: the first time I tasted Omission Pale Ale, after a year and a half of drinking gluten-free beer, I stood stunned in the middle of my kitchen, unable to speak. The regions of my brain still sensitive to barley seemed to light up in neon. I took another sip, and then another. How could I possibly thank Matt for ending what had become, by then, a very long dry spell? He couldn’t comprehend the value of the gift; nobody could, unless he had been drinking sorghum for that long.

  I said to Bec, “Holy shit. This is real beer.”

  I knew that the other GF beers on the market, the sorghum-and-fruit brews I had been drinking and dissing, were real beer—in some places, anyway, and in the academic sense. But this beer had barley flavor. There were hops—a healthy dose of them. There was no funk, no saccharin aftertaste, no overcarbonation. Just hoppy, malty goodness.

  “I have to have more of this,” I told her. “I need an endless supply. Right now.”

  Bec tried the beer, also loved it, and then read the label. She gave me a look that said, Hold on there. Omission is in fact brewed with barley, and through a special process the gluten is removed, or stripped, down to 20 PPM or less. This fact was all over the packaging, like a disclaimer. “There’s some poison in here,” she said.

  I considered that while I drank some more beer. “Well, yes. I suppose there is. But it’s minimal and it’s probably safe and that’s
what makes this beer.”

  “The poison makes it beer?”

  “Well? Doesn’t it?”

  It was a hard argument to counter. She, too, had given up beer. She, too, had come to believe that, the brewing traditions of the world notwithstanding, in our part of the world, barley inhabits beer like wood does trees, to paraphrase a poet-friend of mine.

  “We’ll impose a strict one-beer limit,” I said. “And I’ll adhere to it. I promise.”

  “First we’ll see how you feel in a few hours.”

  She looked worried, and I suppose she had reason to be. This was new territory. Prior to Omission’s introduction to the market in 2012, the debate over the safety of beers from which the gluten has been reduced (“GR” beers) was relatively quiet, perhaps because the available brews were imported from Spain and Belgium in small amounts. When I sampled Daura Damm and Brunehaut that first winter, immediately after I was diagnosed, I definitely liked them, but I also quickly forgot about them. Even in cities that are well stocked with GF options, Brunehaut and Daura Damm can be difficult to find. But Omission thrust questions about GR beer safety for those with celiac disease into the spotlight. Some groups, like the Celiac Support Association, have approved Omission. The CSA views the instruments designed to test for gluten—in particular, what’s known as the R-5 ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) test, which checks for the presence of antigens like gluten epitopes—as accurate and reliable. Other organizations, however, have been outwardly critical or quietly skeptical of beers like Omission. Many gastroenterologists will say that any gluten at all is too much for someone like me, even though recent scientific studies have concluded that 20 PPM a day is “quite safe” for most people with celiac disease. The real worry, the skeptics of GR beers note, is that the R-5 ELISA test was not designed to measure gluten content in hydrolyzed and fermented beverages. Thus the readings in the tests could be inaccurate, which is why the packaging of a beer like Omission Pale Ale or Lager does not say “Gluten-Free.” The FDA will not allow it. Instead, the packaging says “Crafted to Remove Gluten” and “Tested to 20 PPM.”

  I felt fine after drinking my first Omission. I still felt fine the next morning. Would I have told my wife if I felt like shit? I would have tried damn hard to hide it, though it’s difficult for me to cover up the effects of getting glutened. I’m a bit like Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde when something gets me—mood swings, greenish tinge to my face, and all—often prompting Bec to ask, Did you eat something? I would have turned in an Oscar-worthy performance to keep this beer in my fridge. Then I would have pounded one hundred ounces of water, waited a few hours, and gone for a hard 5K run to sweat out the toxins.

  —

  My discovery of Omission came around the time when researchers in particle acceleration were closing in on isolating the Higgs-Boson “God” particle. In that spirit I took to calling the ingredient that put beer back into “GF beer” the God Enzyme. (I also wondered if it would be possible, someday, to do the same thing for bread.)

  David and I immediately started wondering how to get our hands on some of this God Enzyme, known commercially as Brewers Clarex. Derived from a mold, Aspergillus niger, Clarex has for a long time been used to prevent chill-haze in cold-fermented beers like lagers and pilsners, so that the beer pours clear and golden. When introduced to the wort in the proper proportions, at the right point in the brewing process, A. niger renders a beer clear and reduced of a significant amount of its gluten. Simply stated, Clarex inhibits the formation of the chemical bonds in beer that lead to an autoimmune reaction in a person with celiac disease. It disrupts the formation of antigens.

  It turns out that Clarex, and other products like it, are widely available from home-brewing supply companies. Perhaps, David and I thought, we could order an IPA kit, brew it up like we used to, and then dose it with some of this stuff? How great would that be?

  I did a little research—and, unfortunately, the GR brewmasters I talked with said that Clarex needs to be used in a specific way in order to remove gluten. It’s pretty easy if you know what you’re doing, but for a home brewer with celiac disease, the stakes are high. I decided not to go dabbling in this myself, though I did start to wonder why, if it’s a straightforward process, more breweries both in the United States and abroad are not producing GR beers instead of relying on sorghum.

  As Amy Jeuck at Omission Beer told me, Omission Pale Ale came out of a “deeply felt internal need” to make a good barley-based beer safe for people who are intolerant to gluten, not from the trend in gluten-free eating. Their timing was simply fortuitous. Omission would have launched their beers whether the GF diet was popular or not. Development of their GR pale ale began around 2006, when Terry Michaelson, former CEO of the Craft Brew Alliance—Omission’s brewer—was diagnosed with celiac disease, introducing an even crueler irony than the one that befell me: whereas I was a home brewer, here was a guy who owned a whole damned beer company, and he couldn’t even drink his own beer (the Craft Brew Alliance also includes Widmer Brothers, Redhook, and Kona, none of which are gluten-free or gluten-reduced).

  The research and the early batches of beer, according to Jeuck, were highly secretive. The people at Omission knew they did not want to replicate the industry practices of using sorghum. “We wanted to make real beer gluten-free,” Jeuck told me, emphasizing what she thought made beer real: barley. She noted that sorghum is perfectly fine brewing material in other food cultures and traditions, and plenty of celiacs claim that they do not mind the taste of sorghum,*1 but she believed that many American drinkers resist the flavor because it’s not part of our food culture. We weren’t brought up with it.

  After a few years of experimentation, Omission launched their Pale Ale and Lager, and, later on, their IPA. According to Omission’s brewmaster, Joe Casey, it’s possible to reduce the gluten content in all kinds of beers, from lagers to stouts, pale ales to porters.*2 The question, as with all specialty gluten-free items, is about how much product a producer, in this case a brewery, can sell. Casey told me he believes that people tend to drink darker beers in lower numbers than lighter beers, regardless of the time of year. Darker beers are just too rich and heavy to drink in quantity, and when you combine the low consumption with the lower demand for GF beer, a GR stout or porter doesn’t look profitable. (I disagree on the effect of a beer’s darkness, or strength, on its drinkability, but I might not be representative of the beer-drinking culture in America.)

  Another prohibitive factor in GR beer brewing is the special demands on processing. Even in a dedicated facility, tanks and lines must be carefully cleaned, inspected, and tested. Jeuck described something like a lockdown occurring at the facility on bottling day, with no one allowed in or out except at specific times, to eliminate any risk of cross-contamination. The beer is tested internally for gluten, and it’s also tested by external third parties who post the results online, so that drinkers of Omission can verify the gluten-content scores of the bottles they hold in their hands. Jeuck said that Omission has “blasted everywhere that we are made from barley. We’re committed to transparency.” All of these steps are necessary to win the trust of a customer base who will bolt and never come back if a product makes them sick.

  —

  But wait. Before we go stripping the gluten from beer, just how much gluten is in beer?

  I never stopped to ask this question after my diagnosis. I just followed the conventional wisdom: “Beer is made from barley, and barley contains gluten. Sucks to be you.”

  Ancestral beers in Babylon, Egypt, or Sumeria might have been more gluten-rich than most of today’s brews, because they were unfiltered and unclarified. Fortifying the barley mash with emmer, einkorn, or spelt would have resulted in brews with even higher gluten potency. But if the Neolithic grains were indeed different from today’s plants, packing lower concentrations of the harmful 33-mer gliadin peptides, then, like ancestral bread, these brews might also have been less detrimental no matter how muc
h gluten they contained. Gluten content in modern beer is more variable for several reasons, but mostly due to the different approaches to brewing (mashing), fermenting, and filtering that have led to the wide variety in beer styles. The differences between modern and Neolithic brewing practices aside, high-gluten beers are commonly on the shelf today. For example, according to one Swedish study, a single UK pint of Guinness clocks in at 5,000 to 6,000 PPM of gluten. The study’s authors even broke the stylistic conventions of scientific writing and appended an exclamation point to the results—“5-6000!”—as if to say, while leaning back in their lab coats, Whoa, baby! I find these data astonishing, especially given how frequently I enjoyed all stouts, including Guinness. Did I ever drink the entire four-pack of widget cans? Sure, once or twice, on a cold winter’s night with a dinner of lamb-and-bacon stew ladled over roasted fingerling potatoes, and some crusty bread on the side for the gravy—thus ingesting 24,000 PPM gluten from beer alone in one sitting. And I enjoyed every drop.

  Measurement of gluten content in beer has advanced since 2005, when the Swedish study was published, but even if the study’s findings for Guinness were revised down 1,000 PPM, I think I can now explain why my gastrointestinal decline was so rapid. I was drinking stouts in the fall of my diagnosis (to wash down all the bread), and just one Guinness exceeds my 20 PPM limit by 250 times. If gluten had something like a radioactive half-life—which in a sense it does in the form of gliadin antibodies that live on in the blood for a while after exposure, along with razed intestinal microvilli and mucosa—my intestines might still be glowing.