Is Mythos gluten free?

No, standard Mythos is not gluten free, and as a coeliac who has sat at enough Greek taverna tables watching the bottles go round I wish that were not the case. Mythos is a barley malt lager brewed by Olympic Brewery in Greece, and barley contains gluten. There is no enzyme treatment, no gluten free certification, and nothing on the label that brings it below the 20 parts per million limit that Coeliac UK sets for a beer to be called gluten free. The confusion you have read online is real. The answer for coeliacs is not.

What is actually in the bottle

Mythos is a standard lager built on malted barley. Olympic Brewery lists four versions on its own site: Mythos Lager at 5%, Mythos Ice at 4.4%, an alcohol free Mythos 0.0%, and Mythos Radler at 2%. None of them is labelled gluten free. The gluten sits in the barley protein, and a standard lager is not put through any step to remove it, so it stays in the finished beer.

This is the same picture as most mainstream European lagers. It is no different from a Corona or an Estrella Galicia: a refreshing holiday lager made the ordinary way, which means made with gluten. The colour, the lightness and the easy drinking do nothing to change what the grain bill is.

The gluten free Mythos that nobody can find

Here is where the internet gets tangled. Some pages claim Olympic Brewery produces a Mythos Gluten Free variant. As of June 2026 we could not confirm it. No gluten free Mythos appears on the Olympic Brewery product page, and we found no UK retailer stocking one. If such a product exists it is not on general sale in the UK. We could not verify its availability, so check with the brewery directly before buying anything on that basis.

What that means in practice is simple. The Mythos you can actually buy here, in a supermarket or a Greek restaurant, is the standard barley lager. Treat it as such.

The alcohol free Mythos 0.0% is no help either. Removing the alcohol does nothing to the grain, so a non alcoholic barley lager still carries the gluten. If you are coeliac, an alcohol free Mythos is no safer than the full strength one. For a beer to count as gluten free it has to be certified at 20 parts per million or below and labelled accordingly, and no Mythos is.

Why people swear it is fine

Three things keep this question alive. A 2017 home test, posted to lowgluten.org, used a consumer Imutest kit with a detection limit of 1 to 2 ppm and came back negative. It recorded no actual gluten figure, because that kind of strip test only tells you present or absent, not how much. From there the result spread into forum threads and a widely shared Facebook post, until a single field test became received wisdom.

The third thing is holiday experience. Plenty of people drink Mythos in the Greek sun and feel fine. That can happen for two reasons. Fermentation does break down some gluten, so a standard lager sometimes tests low without being certified, and that figure is not stable from batch to batch. Individual tolerance also varies, and some coeliacs react to far less than others. Neither is a safety standard. Feeling fine once is not the same as a beer being safe to drink.

What to drink instead

If you want a clean lager you can trust, switch brands rather than gamble on Mythos. A few from our directory worth a look:

• Bellfield Ace Lager, 3.2%. A gluten reduced lager certified below 20ppm, light and herbal with a lemon and lime finish. The easiest swap if you want something sessionable.
• Greens Dry Hopped Lager, 4.1%. Brewed without barley and certified gluten free, golden and a touch more characterful than a mainstream lager.
• Brightside Helles Lager, 4.8%. A gluten reduced German style Helles. We couldn’t confirm this beer’s certification details from our directory data, so check with the brewery directly if that matters to you. The closest in body and strength to the lager you would order on holiday.

For more in this style, see our guide to gluten free lager, or browse the full list of brands we have checked.