Is Camden Hells gluten free?

Camden Hells is a barley lager, and that settles it for anyone with coeliac disease. Camden Town Brewery lists the recipe as malted barley, hops, water and yeast, with a contains malted barley allergen statement on the label. Barley carries gluten, and Camden Hells does nothing to take it back out, so the beer is not gluten free and not safe for coeliacs.

What is actually in the can

The base is malted barley, the workhorse grain behind most lagers. There is no enzyme treatment, no gluten reduction and no gluten free certification anywhere on the pack. The clearest signal you can read straight off the label is that contains malted barley line. If a beer says it contains barley, it has gluten in it.

That holds even though Camden Hells is suitable for vegans. People mix the two up, but they are separate questions. Vegan means no animal products went into the brewing or fining. It says nothing about gluten. A vegan beer brewed from barley is still a gluten beer.

Gluten free is not the same as gluten reduced

The categories matter here, because Camden Hells fits neither of the safe ones.

A gluten free beer is brewed without gluten grains in the first place, using something like rice, millet or buckwheat. A gluten reduced beer does start with barley, then uses an enzyme during fermentation to break the gluten protein down below the legal 20 parts per million limit. Beers like Peroni Gluten Free and Stella Artois Gluten Free sit in that second group, and even those remain debated for strict coeliacs.

Camden Hells has been through none of this. It is a plain barley lager with the gluten left in. Regular barley malt runs into the thousands of parts per million, hundreds of times over the threshold a beer needs to clear to call itself gluten free. There is no ambiguity to weigh up here.

What to drink instead

If it is the clean, malty Helles character of Camden Hells you are after, a few lagers in our directory get you there without the gluten:

• Daura Damm, 5.4%. The closest like for like. A crisp Spanish lager with every batch certified by the Spanish National Research Council, consistently coming in below 3 parts per million. The strongest evidence trail of any beer we cover.
• Bristol Beer Factory Infinity, 4.6%. A certified gluten free Helles built for repeated drinking, with traditional German hops and a dry finish. The nearest match in style to a beer like Camden Hells.
• Birmingham Brewing Company Stirchley Lager, 4.4%. A dry hopped craft lager, enzyme treated to reduce gluten, light and crisp with pine and citrus on the nose.

All three are gluten reduced beers brewed from barley rather than naturally gluten free, so check the certification suits your own tolerance. For more in this style, see our guide to gluten free lager, or browse the full beer directory.