Vegan Friendly Beer

I’ve always been an advocate of inclusivity in the brewing world; beer, after all, is a drink enjoyed by every layer of the social strata. As long as you’re of legal drinking age, I’m a firm believer that there’s a beer out there for you.

However, there are a few challenges to producing beer that can be universally enjoyed, the most pressing of which is the presence of gluten in the final product. For coeliacs, this is a pretty steep hurdle to enjoying a nice pint. While there are means to produce Gluten Free or Gluten Reduced beers, this is an area where I’m still conducting experiments in our pilot brewery. Watch this space!

Another hurdle is for our vegan friends, who can’t drink any beer produced with the use of isinglass as a processing aid. Isinglass is a traditional fining agent used in the majority of breweries in the UK, which causes yeast to sediment more effectively and more quickly than normal. Isinglass is also derived from the swim bladders of sturgeon, which makes it an animal product – and thus non-vegan. (And before you start wondering about why your beer doesn’t taste like a fish supper, isinglass is to fish what shellac is to insects. And if it’s done its job correctly, you never even ingest any isinglass in your beer!)

Until recently, all our Arran Brewery bottled ales were unsuitable for vegans, as we used isinglass as a processing aid between the Fermentation Vessel and the Conditioning Tanks prior to bottling. As you can guess from my use of the past tense, we have stopped using isinglass this year in favour of a vegan friendly alternative.

I’ve held off publishing this blog until we had sold through the last of our isinglass-processed beer – but at last, the day has finally come! All the bottled beers sold from our Brewery Shop are now 100% vegan friendly.

Welcome to the party, pals!