It’s a tough world out there for vegans. No leather belts or shoes. A distinct lack of bacon at breakfast. Even most booze is off-limits for strict vegans.
What’s that, gentle reader? Something about how you have been faithfully following this column for years, and you know for a fact that the Bavarian beer purity law of 1516 states that the only permitted ingredients in beer are water, hops, and barley, all of which are vegan-friendly?
Indeed, that may be true, but much like vegans will not eat a pineapple wrapped in bacon, they also will not drink a beer filtered through fish bladders.
Pretty much all booze, be it beer, wine, or spirits, starts out with a sugary/starchy liquid, to which yeast is added to convert the sugars to alcohol.
After the fermentation process is complete, the now-alcoholic liquid still has plenty of dead yeast cells floating around, which need to be removed before bottling.
This process is known as clarification, and it usually involves adding isinglass finings, a gelatinous substance derived from the swim bladders of fish. The isinglass finings contain collagen, whose positive electrostatic charge attracts the negatively charged yeast cells, which clump together and fall out of solution due to gravity.
The clumped isinglass finings and yeast cells are then filtered out, leaving a nice clear beer or wine that is suitable for bottling.
Clear beers are actually a fairly recent invention, with pretty much all booze before 1900 being a murky haze. Back in the middle ages, your friendly neighbourhood drinking establishment would pass around a beer-filled earthenware bowl with lines carved on the inside. Unable to see the bottom of the bowl through the hazy liquid, each thirsty patron would pay a shilling to “take it down a peg” by drinking down to the next line in the bowl.
In the modern day, consumer preferences are for a cleaner-looking booze that, so heavy filtration and clarification has been used for the past century or so, with isinglass finings being the most commonly used agent.
The use of isinglass finings as a clarifying agent in booze has long been a sore point for the devout granola-munching vegans of the world, who were unable to drown their utter-lack-of-bacon related sorrows in a pint, making their lives even more empty.
Fortunately, the fine folks at Guinness are stepping up the plate, and have just announced that the world-famous Guinness Irish Stout will become vegan-friendly by this time next year.
While Guinness has been pouring their delicious black nectar since 1759, the recipe has changed a bit over the years, with isinglass finings added to the clarification process sometime in the early 1900s.
Luckily, with advances in filtration technology, modern brewers are able to drag the yeast cells out of their brews without resorting to electrostatic flocculating agents like isinglass.
While this change was just announced last month for the flagship Guinness brewery in Dublin, we Canadians have already gotten a sneak peek, with no one the wiser to the changes.
In the wild and crazy supply chains of the global booze market, sometimes even arch-competitors will brew and distribute each other’s beer, just because it gets crazy expensive to ship zillions of tallboy cans across the ocean.
Yes, gentle reader, the Guinness Extra Stout sold in the North American market was brewed under contract by the Moosehead Brewery in New Brunswick for many years, but production moved to the Labatt Brewery in Toronto in June of this year.
Even though Guinness is owned by the London-based Diageo booze conglomerate, a bitter arch-rival of Labatt’s parent company AB InBev from Belgium, the two industry juggernauts still cooperate by producing and distributing each other’s brands in countries where one or the other lacks production or distribution facilities.
Being more modern facilities than the centuries-old Guinness Brewery in Dublin, both Moosehead and Labatt were able to produce their contract brews of Guinness without isinglass finings, making the Guinness available in North America vegan-friendly long before the rest of the world.
Your humble narrator has long been a purveyor of all things Guinness, so if I didn’t notice a change in the flavour when they went vegan-friendly, I wager that no one else will either.
So, go out and enjoy a Guinness, just don’t ruin it for your vegan friends by pairing it with a bacon cheeseburger!
