Gluten Free Beer ppm: What the UK Threshold Means and Which Beers Pass
UK law lets a beer carry a gluten free label if it tests under 20 ppm. The catch is what "under 20" actually measures, and which beers are safe for coeliacs.
By Simon · Updated 29 May 2026
Most people searching for ppm and gluten free beer are working out one thing. Whether a beer that says “gluten free” on the front is actually safe to drink.
The short answer is: under UK law, a beer can only carry a gluten free label if it tests below 20 parts per million of gluten, the same legal threshold used for all food. The longer answer is that the test itself has known limits when applied to beer, and the gap between “tested below 20 ppm” and “genuinely safe for coeliac disease” is wider than the label admits. This guide walks the legal threshold, the testing method, the difference between gluten free and gluten reduced, and the beers we currently list that pass on each definition.
The UK legal threshold: what 20 ppm means in practice
UK law permits a “gluten free” label on any food or drink containing fewer than 20 parts per million of gluten. The threshold is set by retained EU Regulation 828/2014 and enforced by the Food Standards Agency. Coeliac UK uses the same number as the basis of its accreditation scheme.
A second category exists at 20 to 100 ppm and is labelled “very low gluten”. UK brewers almost never use it. Almost every gluten free beer on a UK shelf is aiming for the lower number, because consumers don’t read “very low gluten” as a buying signal.
There is also a labelling quirk worth knowing. If a beer is brewed from barley but treated to reduce its gluten content, the allergen information on the label must still declare “contains barley”, even while the front states “gluten free”. The two statements are technically consistent under UK law. They read as a contradiction to anyone shopping for coeliac safety.
Gluten free and gluten reduced are not the same thing
A naturally gluten free beer is brewed from grains that never contained gluten. Millet, sorghum, buckwheat, brown rice. The protein simply isn’t there in the raw material.
A gluten reduced beer starts from barley or wheat and is treated with a proline specific enzyme during fermentation, most commonly Brewers Clarex (made by DSM) or Clarity-Ferm. The enzyme cleaves gluten proteins into smaller peptide fragments. Those fragments are small enough that the standard antibody test struggles to register them, which produces a reading below 20 ppm and, in the UK, qualifies the beer for the gluten free label.
This is the gap the brief was built around. The UK allows enzyme treated beers to use the gluten free label. The US, under FDA rules, does not. The label says the same thing in both countries; the beer behind it is processed in very different ways.
Coeliac UK certifies gluten-removed beers under its Crossed Grain scheme if they test below 20 ppm. Some US coeliac organisations, including Beyond Celiac and the Gluten Intolerance Group, take a stricter position and advise against gluten-reduced beers as a category. The protein fragments are still in the liquid. They are just not being counted.
ppm by beer style: the base numbers
These are the untreated baseline figures from Tanner GJ et al. (PLoS One, 2013; PMC3585340), widely reproduced across the brewing industry. They show what gluten is in a finished beer before any treatment is applied.
| Beer style | Approx. baseline gluten | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Lager | around 60 ppm | Low protein barley, long cold conditioning |
| Stout | several hundred ppm | Higher malt load, darker grain bills |
| Pale ale | around 3,000 ppm | Larger grain bills, more protein retained |
| Wheat beer | mean ~32,000 ppm (range 8,000–47,000 ppm) | Wheat is high gluten by nature |
The point of this table is to explain why the styles that succeed as gluten free are heavily skewed towards lager and pilsner. A lager only needs to come down from about 60 ppm to qualify. A wheat beer needs to come down by a factor of more than a thousand. Enzyme treatment can do a lot of work, but the further the starting point, the more there is to leave behind.
It also explains why our directory tilts the way it does. Of the 254 beers we currently list, lager, pale ale and IPA lead the count. Wheat-style beers are almost entirely absent.
UK gluten free beers in our directory: how they break down
The freefrombeer directory currently lists 254 beers from 61 UK breweries. Two of those breweries are naturally gluten free (Altgrain Brewery and Green’s). The rest are gluten reduced producers using enzyme treatment and post fermentation processing to bring barley or wheat based beers below the 20 ppm threshold.
The split that matters for coeliac safety is not by beer style. It is by the brewery’s approach.
| Brewery | Location | Approach | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Altgrain Brewery | Southend-on-Sea, Essex | Naturally gluten free | Brewed from gluten free grains. One beer listed |
| Bellfield Brewery | Abbeyhill, Edinburgh | Gluten reduced, independently certified | Ten beers, every batch tested below 20 ppm |
| Birmingham Brewing Company | Stirchley, Birmingham | Gluten reduced | Dedicated gluten reduced site |
| Brass Castle Brewery | Malton, North Yorkshire | Gluten reduced | Targets below 10 ppm as a safety margin |
| Brightside Brewing | Radcliffe, Greater Manchester | Gluten reduced | |
| Bristol Beer Factory | Bristol | Gluten reduced | |
| Green’s | Brewed in Lochristi, Belgium | Naturally gluten free | Six beers, tested at 0 ppm |
| Hambleton Brewery | Melmerby, North Yorkshire | Gluten reduced | |
| Little Ox Brewery | Freeland, Oxfordshire | Gluten reduced | |
| Purity Brewing | Great Alne, Warwickshire | Gluten reduced | |
| Triple Point Brewing | Sheffield | Gluten reduced |
If you have coeliac disease, the two breweries to start with are Altgrain and Green’s, because the underlying grains never contained gluten in the first place. After that, Bellfield is the most thoroughly certified option in the directory, with every beer carrying independent certification testing on its product record.
Browse the full list of 254 beers and filter by brewery to see what each one carries.
What ppm is safe if you have coeliac disease?
Coeliac UK’s clinical position is that food and drink below 20 ppm is safe for people on a gluten free diet. That is the basis for the legal threshold. The wrinkle is specific to beer.
The standard test, sandwich R5 ELISA, was designed for unprocessed food. In an enzyme treated beer the gluten has been deliberately cut into small pieces. Pieces small enough to slip past the sandwich format underreport on the test, so a beer labelled “below 20 ppm” can carry more reactive gluten protein than the number suggests. This is why some US coeliac organisations, including Beyond Celiac and the Gluten Intolerance Group, advise against gluten-reduced beers as a category, regardless of the figure on the label.
A few UK brewers self-impose stricter limits as a hedge. Brass Castle Brewery publishes a target of below 10 ppm. Bellfield Brewery tests “gluten absent” (below the detection threshold) on every batch. Neither is a guarantee, but both are tighter than the legal line and worth the premium if you are coeliac.
If you have a milder gluten sensitivity rather than coeliac disease, the picture changes. Enzyme-treated beers below 20 ppm are tolerated by many people with non-coeliac sensitivity. The clinical consensus only hardens against them in the coeliac population.
How gluten in beer is tested
The standard method in the UK and EU is the R5 ELISA, an antibody based assay developed for gluten detection in food. The sandwich version, which is by far the most common, identifies gluten by binding two antibodies to two different sites on a single protein fragment. Two binding sites are required to register a positive count.
In normally fermented beer the gluten proteins are already partially broken down, which is why standard lager tests around 60 ppm rather than the much higher value present in the raw grain. In enzyme treated beer the breakdown is more aggressive. Many fragments end up with only one binding site, which means the sandwich test does not see them. The beer reads as below 20 ppm; the active gluten content is higher.
A competitive ELISA, recognised as the AOAC official method for fermented foods, detects single fragments. Some breweries (Brass Castle is one example) commission additional testing under this method as a confirmation step. Coeliac UK’s Crossed Grain certification scheme calls for testing at a UKAS-accredited facility, with a documented process map and retesting whenever raw materials change, though no statute mandates this directly. The compliance bar is high. The interpretive bar, for coeliac safety, is higher.
Where to find verified gluten free beers in the UK
Most supermarket gluten free beer is gluten reduced, not naturally gluten free. Brands like Peroni Gluten Free, Estrella Damm Daura, Stella Artois Gluten Free and BrewDog Vagabond use enzyme treatment on standard barley malt and meet the under-20 ppm threshold by test. They are legally and labelling-wise gluten free. They are also the beers most coeliac organisations would advise against.
For naturally gluten free options, the list is short. Altgrain Brewery ships from Southend-on-Sea. Green’s ships UK-wide through specialist online retailers. Bellfield ships direct from Edinburgh and has the strongest independent certification record of any gluten reduced brewer in the country.
Browse the full directory of 254 UK gluten free beers to filter by brewery, style or approach, or start with our 61 listed breweries if you want to choose by producer rather than by beer.
Frequently asked questions
What does "gluten free" mean on a beer label in the UK?
In the UK, a beer can only carry a gluten free label if it tests below 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten. The threshold is set under retained EU Regulation 828/2014 and enforced by the Food Standards Agency. A separate "very low gluten" category covers 20 to 100 ppm but is rarely used by beer producers, who almost always target the lower number. One important quirk: if the beer was brewed from barley, the allergen information must still declare "contains barley", even on a bottle that says gluten free on the front.
What is the difference between gluten free and gluten reduced beer?
A naturally gluten free beer is brewed from grains that never contained gluten in the first place, such as millet, sorghum, buckwheat or rice. A gluten reduced beer is brewed from barley or wheat and then treated with a proline specific enzyme that breaks the gluten proteins into smaller fragments. The fragments can read below 20 ppm on the standard laboratory test, which means UK law allows the beer to be labelled gluten free. The protein fragments themselves are still in the liquid. In the US, gluten reduced beers are not allowed to use the gluten free label at all.
How many ppm of gluten is safe for coeliac disease?
The UK legal standard is below 20 ppm and certified gluten free beers brewed from naturally gluten free grains are widely considered safe at that level. The complication is enzyme treated beers. Some US coeliac organisations, including Beyond Celiac and the Gluten Intolerance Group, advise against gluten-reduced beers regardless of the reading, because the standard sandwich ELISA test can underreport hydrolysed gluten. Coeliac UK certifies gluten-removed beers that test below 20 ppm, but directs consumers to its Food and Drink Guide for a list of certified products. If you have coeliac disease, the number to look for is not just 20 ppm. It is "certified gluten free" or, better, brewed from grains that never contained gluten.
Can people with coeliac disease drink gluten reduced beer?
Some US coeliac organisations, including Beyond Celiac and the Gluten Intolerance Group, advise against gluten-reduced beers as a category. A study from the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center found that participants did not react to certified gluten free beer but some did react to gluten reduced beer, even when the test reading was below 20 ppm. The enzyme breaks gluten proteins into smaller pieces that slip past the standard antibody test, but those pieces can still trigger an immune response. Gluten reduced beer is more suited to non-coeliac gluten sensitivity than to coeliac disease itself.
Is lager lower in gluten than ale?
Yes, substantially. Independent testing puts untreated lager somewhere around 60 ppm of gluten, untreated pale ale around 3,000 ppm, and wheat beer well above 20,000 ppm. Lager uses lower protein barley, higher water to malt ratios and longer cold conditioning, which reduces residual protein. This is why most successful UK gluten free beers are lager or pilsner forward, and why a genuinely gluten free wheat beer is almost impossible to produce by enzyme treatment alone.
How is gluten in beer tested?
The standard method is the R5 ELISA, an antibody test that detects gluten by binding to specific sites on the protein. The sandwich version requires two binding sites on the same fragment to register a result. In beer the protein is partially broken down by fermentation, and in enzyme treated beer the breakdown is more aggressive, leaving fragments with only one binding site. Those fragments can pass the sandwich test without being counted. A competitive ELISA, which is the AOAC official method for fermented foods, can detect single fragments and gives a more accurate reading on treated beers. Coeliac UK's Crossed Grain certification scheme calls for testing at a UKAS-accredited facility with documented batch records, though no statute mandates this directly.
What beers in our directory are certified gluten free?
Of the 254 beers we list, the ones with independent certification testing recorded include the Bellfield Brewery range (10 beers, all tested below 20 ppm) and the Green's range (6 beers, tested at 0 ppm and brewed from naturally gluten free grains in Belgium). Altgrain Brewery in Southend-on-Sea is the only UK brewery in our directory that brews from naturally gluten free grains. Full ratings sit on each individual beer page.