Home Gluten Extraction

[SpillsMostOfIt]

I'm sitting looking at the Gluten Free Beer kit from Brewer's Choice and I get the idea to actually do some research on gluten. Wikipedia is the first site I find to say something of note.

It seems that gluten is not soluble in water. Buddhist monks use this fact to help extract it from wheat flour and make meat substitute (and have done so well before the invention of the icy-pole stick). I guess that the by-product of this process would be gluten-free wheat slurry.

Today, gluten is extracted in a similar way using centrifuges. I wonder if I could reduce the amount of gluten in my brewing grains to achieve what counts as 'Gluten Free' in Australia (<5ppm)?

Has anyone tried making their own meat substitute? Understanding that there is a heap of work involved in what I'm suggesting, can anyone see any obvious flaws in the concept for beer production?

 

[MHB]

Extracting some of the gluten from the grain and concentrating the gluten if far from a guarantee that you have extracted ALL of the gluten, that isnt the intention of the process.

There was a Choice article a few years ago on de-caffeinated coffee.
Some of the cheep low grade de-caff had more caffeine than the un-de-caffeinated coffee tested. It just had less than it started out with before the caffeine level was reduced.

I think you would be well advised to look at the process in a little more detail before you assume that you are getting the outcome you are suggesting.

MHB

 

[SpillsMostOfIt]

Does PVPP attract gluten, and to what extent might that reduce such things in a pre-mash environment?

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Just referencing the article I posted in the "common ground" section. It was about a study of gluten levels in "normal" beer

It seems that the large majority (every beer tested) of beers made exclusively from Barley (ie no wheat, Rye etc) contain levels of Gluten that in Australia would be regarded as low. ie: <200ppm

More than 50% of the beers tested came in with gluten levels @ <20pp - which I think would be considered pretty much gluten free even here in Aus. I know the definition is "no detectable Gluten" but I think that practically, that equates to less than 30ppm. Or at least a couple of the things I found on the web about Australian food labeling mention the 30ppm figure anyway... could be way off.

The tests used in this (German) study bottom out at 10ppm and a number of the beers tested came in at below the detectable level, ie were, by any definition, gluten free.

Now remember, these were all German beers, so in all likelihood... there would have been no adjunct additions. Pure malt.

So if you made a little effort to lighten the load by making a relatively high sugar/rice/corn adjunct beer, and/or using say 30-50% unmalted other gluten free grains, you would get even more of the product down to "Gluten Free" levels

If you managed to extract any significant amount of gluten from the barley before you made beer out of it (What Spills was talking about) I strongly suspect that you could get virtually any beer down to undetectable gluten levels

Now I'm not a Doctor, or any sort of authority on Gluten free stuff... I'm just looking at the data from the study and speculating on how it would combine with Spills' idea

 

[SpillsMostOfIt]

My thinking is that if you used something like malted sorghum or buckwheat as the base malt and performed such jiggery pokery on some specialty malts to add some more traditional malty-beer-like flavour, and depending on how sensitive your test subject (err... audience) is to gluten...

 

[MHB]

Just done a bit of reading and the more I look at it the more convinced I am that what you are thinking about hasn't got much chance of working well enough to guarantee that the finished product would be "gluten free".

There are several factors coming into play:-
Malting the grain changes a lot of the pretentious material in grain into soluble forms; these are what we see as hot and cold break later in the brewing process. Some soluble protein is wanted in the finished beer.

The method of separation referred to is a cold water extraction applied to sifted white flour, the mass remaining is 70-80% Gluten. As brewers we are using the whole (modified) grain.
If you extracted the cold water soluble starch (this is a standard test) you would have the husks and any insoluble bits in one place and the starch we want to convert into saccharides in another - and dammed if I know where the enzymes would be, but the husks we use as a filter are in with the gluten we separated earlier.

Beer requires a small but significant amount of protein (or degradation products) in solution for mouthfeel and head retention, there is no way to tell in advance if you are getting the products you want verses the ones that cause problems (interesting project for some aspiring biochemist)

Worst of all, those with gluten allergies appear not to be allergic to gluten but to a specific amino acid that is part of gluten, until recently the testing methods used to detect gluten said that none made it through the brewing process (the test wasnt specific for the unwanted protein that is separated from the gluten as a whole during brewing), there are now I believe new tests that work on a immunological homolog (respond to the presence of the allergen like the human immune system does).

I dont think PVPP isnt going to help either, what it removes is a specific component in chill haze, but I can find nothing that relates to the proteins that are at issue (my thought is that if PVPP were less selective, it would remove the proteins we want in the beer as well as the ones we want out of the beer, which it doesn't)

Interesting idea but I dont think this is going to fly, defiantly some thought provoking implications. The first one that came to mind was what happens to all the starch, obviously it has many industrial uses, but if we made a flour from malt sifted out the husks, then do the cold water extraction, would the enzymes extract with the starch, if we then warmed the solution would the starch in solution convert?

Lots of fun to think about

MHB

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Worst of all, those with gluten allergies appear not to be allergic to gluten but to a specific amino acid that is part of gluten, until recently the testing methods used to detect gluten said that none made it through the brewing process (the test wasn’t specific for the unwanted protein that is separated from the gluten as a whole during brewing), there are now I believe new tests that work on a immunological homolog (respond to the presence of the allergen like the human immune system does).

MHB, you are on the money there. The Brauwelt article I posted talks very specifically about using immunological tests (they use two different variations)... still while they might have been unable to find gluten in beer with the old tests, it seems they can't find a great deal of it even with the new ones.

I think you have definitely hit on one flaw in Spills' plan though ... that being that malting renders a lot of the proteins soluble, meaning that they can't be separated by a method that relies on them being insoluable.

Pity - beer is so close to being gluten free that it just needs a little nudge and shimmey to get it over the line - I think that there is some promise in taking a few of the beer types that qualify as "low gluten" or very nearly gluten free, and blending them with beers that are made from completely gluten free ingredients to get their levels of gluten down to the safe threshold. Whether thats done by blending completed beer, or by making a beer with mixed ingredients.... only experimenting would tell.

Trouble is... bet those testing kits are damn expensive, and the only other way to test any beer you might come up with is to give it to a coeliac sufferer and see if they keel over. Probably wouldn't have a massive queue of volunteers!!

Mind you, I am interested in this because I have a friend or two who are somewhat gluten intolerant.. they aren't full blown coeliacs. So I suspect rather strongly, that a fairly low strength beer made with 20% rice/corn or sugar adjunct and 80% barley... would easily fall into the Low Gluten category and they would be OK to drink it (in moderation of course)

Good for thinkin' about

Thirsty

 

[MHB]

Random Thought
Here is a great product for some bright scientist. Make a "Gluten dip stick" like those ones we use for pH, or more properly, like those used for pregnancy tests and urinalysis.

Touch the tip to your food or dip it in a drink, if it goes pink (i.e.) dont eat it - shouldnt be all that hard, it's just a specific enzyme linked to Fluorescein (well thats the very short description)

Sort of like a modern equivalent to the medieval unicorns horn.

MHB

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Random Thought
Here is a great product for some bright scientist. Make a "Gluten dip stick" like those ones we use for pH, or more properly, like those used for pregnancy tests and urinalysis.

Touch the tip to your food or dip it in a drink, if it goes pink (i.e.) dont eat it - shouldnt be all that hard, it's just a specific enzyme linked to Fluorescein (well thats the very short description)

Sort of like a modern equivalent to the medieval unicorns horn.

MHB

That IS a good idea.

How about a small vial of a coeliacs blood?? put a crumb of the food in the vial and if it curdles.....

once again...maybe no great queue of volunteers

 

[SpillsMostOfIt]

Home Gluten Test Kits run to about USD80, and give you four or five tests before junking. That's a bit rich for mine.

I think the malting-makes-soluble argument is the one that convinces me - mainly because I don't have room to build my own maltings...

Still, it's through pondering dumb concepts that I occassionally come up with something feasible...

Having said that, I wonder if the temperature they kiln dark malts at denatures proteins such as those comprising gluten?

 

[Millet Man]

I'm sitting looking at the Gluten Free Beer kit from Brewer's Choice and I get the idea to actually do some research on gluten. Wikipedia is the first site I find to say something of note.

It seems that gluten is not soluble in water. Buddhist monks use this fact to help extract it from wheat flour and make meat substitute (and have done so well before the invention of the icy-pole stick). I guess that the by-product of this process would be gluten-free wheat slurry.

Today, gluten is extracted in a similar way using centrifuges. I wonder if I could reduce the amount of gluten in my brewing grains to achieve what counts as 'Gluten Free' in Australia (<5ppm)?

Has anyone tried making their own meat substitute? Understanding that there is a heap of work involved in what I'm suggesting, can anyone see any obvious flaws in the concept for beer production?

As MHB has already commented, the "wheat starch" by-product would still contain gluten. This is why commercially made wheat starch is not a gluten free product. The gluten free threshold in Australia is "no detectable gluten" which is about 5ppm by the current ELISA test method. The code also states that to be gluten free a product cannot contain malt (from a gluten grain) or oats, the malt is banned as the current test cannot properly detect the smaller protein peptides which are still toxic and oats are banned because there is some debate over their toxicity and they are invariably contaminated with wheat, barley or rye.

I will post a more in depth explanation in the topic posted by Thirsty Boy's.

Cheers, Andrew.