Black Isle Brewery: organic beer, and gluten free tested every batch

I started Free From Beer after a coeliac diagnosis took beer off the table overnight. Part of that is talking to the breweries making good gluten free beer. This week I caught up with Black Isle Brewery: Annie-Kirsty, who handles marketing and sales support, and Mark Campbell, who runs sales and operations and knows the beer inside out.

Black Isle Brewery tests every batch of its gluten free beer, and won’t sell it until the result is back.

“We test every batch,” Mark told me. “Everything we pack, it’s normally a mix of keg and cans. We send a can or two away for testing, the head brewer does that, it comes back within a week, and then the stock is released for sale.” No result, no sale. Most breweries that make gluten free beer test now and then. Black Isle does it every time, and the numbers come back in single figures. The law does not ask them to. They do it anyway.

A brewery that was organic first

Black Isle has been brewing since 1998, on the Black Isle peninsula north of Inverness. It is Scotland’s organic brewery, and the organic part came first. The beer is made on the brewery’s own organic farm, around 180 acres, with no synthetic pesticides or herbicides. They have planted native woodland, put in wetlands and hedges, and run wildlife surveys every couple of years. The beers are named after the birds on the site. Goldfinch. Red Kite. Yellowhammer. It is also a certified B Corp, which few breweries are.

That background matters more than it first looks. The most common complaint about free from food is that it is ultra processed, propped up with additives and dressed up as healthy. Annie, who is training as a nutritionist alongside her marketing role, feels that one keenly. “A lot of gluten free products are loaded with additives, gums and thickeners,” she said. “We’re very organic, no synthetic chemicals or pesticides. I think that’s what keeps us a really high quality gluten free option.”

This started with Annie’s cousin. “I have a cousin who’s coeliac, similar situation, lost beer overnight,” Annie said. “She’s a really big fan of Goldfinch. So I thought, this is something we should be pushing more.”

Mark sees it from the organic side too. “We’ve got a similar thing,” he said. “Putting organic in front of something, people question what it is. Does it mean it’s more expensive? Does it mean it’s not as good?” Both are labels that make some drinkers hesitate. Neither should.

Goldfinch, and the letters on the badge

Goldfinch is the one most people know. An organic session IPA at 3.4%, part of the range for years. Look closely at the badge and the G and the F are picked out in different colours, because they stand for gluten free. The kind of detail you only spot once it is pointed out.

It has not always been 3.4%. “It used to be a 3.8, 3.9% session IPA,” Mark said. “When the duty went up about three years ago we changed it to 3.4, and that’s when we really started putting gluten free front and centre.” It is not a quiet beer for the strength. Five different hops and a US-05 yeast give it what Mark calls “a piney, almost American style IPA flavour.”

Helles is the newer one. An unfiltered lager, also 3.4%. Black Isle has brewed a house lager, the Blonde, since day one at 4.5%, and the Helles came from wanting something lower and keener priced for pubs down in Glasgow and Edinburgh. “We had a German head brewer, here ten years, obsessed with making good lager,” Mark said. “It took a bit of convincing to make it 3.4%, but we’ve ended up with a really solid lager.” Making it gluten free was the finishing touch.

One to be clear on for anyone coeliac: Halo, the brewery’s 0.3% low alcohol beer, is not gluten free, so it sits outside all of this.

Goldfinch and Helles. Tap the cans for the full detail on each.

How they actually do it

Goldfinch and Helles are brewed from barley, like any other beer, then treated during fermentation with Brewers Clarex, a proline specific enzyme that breaks the gluten proteins down. “It’s easier for us to do a normal beer and then use the enzyme to get the gluten out of it,” Mark said. The same enzyme does a second job, clearing haze, which is partly why they reach for it. The beer runs through a centrifuge rather than a filter, to hold on to flavour.

Then it gets tested, every batch, as Mark described, and the results sit consistently under 10ppm. “It’s always single figures for us,” he said. Under 20ppm is the UK legal threshold and widely treated as safe, basically zero. Black Isle comes in under half that.

And it costs them very little, easily absorbed into the price of the beer. A cost they are happy to swallow, and an easy one to justify for a beer that opens up to a whole group of drinkers who would otherwise walk past.

Black Isle’s beers are gluten reduced, not naturally gluten free beer brewed from grains that never contained gluten. The two are not the same, and if you are coeliac it is worth understanding the difference before you drink either one. We walk through it in our guide to gluten free beer and ppm. What Black Isle does, within the gluten reduced approach, is about as rigorous as it gets in the UK: every batch, independently, to a number most breweries never publish.

The market is moving

Mark has been at Black Isle four years and has watched demand climb. “A lot of people want the box ticked now, a bit like low alcohol,” he said. “The last two years there’s been a noticeable increase. In Edinburgh, pubs often want a gluten free option for the summer.” And it is not just any gluten free beer. “If someone’s only got six taps, they can’t just chuck any old gluten free beer on. They care about the quality of it.”

Annie sees it from the inbox. “I’ve had loads of people message on Instagram asking where they can get Goldfinch because it’s gluten free, where it’s on tap,” she said. “It shows there’s an increase in demand.” She has watched it from the other side of a counter too, from a previous job at a cafe. “People came specifically because we had a good range of gluten and dairy free cakes. People will go for it specifically because it’s gluten free.” And the line that sums it up: “I’m not gluten free, but I really enjoy Goldfinch.”

Which is exactly the point both of them kept coming back to. As Mark put it, “more often than not it’s, oh, it’s a great beer that happens to be gluten free.” That is the bar.

They are not finished, either. They get asked for a gluten free dark beer they do not yet make, and Mark reckons they will “probably do more over time.”

Where to buy it

Goldfinch has just landed in around 285 Co-op stores across Scotland, the brewery’s biggest step up in reach and the easiest place to find it north of the border. Both beers are also available direct from the Black Isle online shop, and Goldfinch turns up at some online retailers too.

My verdict

If you have written gluten free beer off as the swill at the bottom of the free from aisle, Black Isle is a good reason to look again. Organic, properly made, and backed by the most thorough testing routine I have come across so far. A brewery doing more than the rules demand, and not charging extra for it. Start with Goldfinch.

You can see both in our directory on the Black Isle Brewery page, with the full detail on the Goldfinch and the Helles.