Well known for its gluten-free bottled beers – Hambleton's Gluten Free Ale (GFA) was voted the best gluten-free ale at the World Beer Awards 2015 – the North Yorkshire brewery claims its first foray into cask conditioning gluten-free beer is "indistinguishable from beer containing gluten".
Rather than brew a new beer, the brewery researched how to remove the gluten from its existing Stud Blonde beer in order to appeal to a more universal audience.
To test whether the beer's flavour was indistinguishable, the brewery has been selling the gluten-free beer as normal Stud Blonde with no one noticing a change to the Stud Blonde taste, according to the brewery.
Hambleton Ales owner Nick Stafford said: "Stud Blonde has been a staple of our range for many years now and is a very popular beer across Yorkshire and the north-east.
"With many pubs and restaurants now offering gluten-free options on their menus, this innovation means that they can complement these with a proper Yorkshire cask ale that can be enjoyed by all customers equally."
The method of brewing the beer has not been altered, using malted barley grown locally on the Yorkshire Wolds, but a final step is added at the end to remove the gluten through a special process.
Each batch is then independently tested and certified as containing less than 20ppm (parts per million) of gluten, meeting the UK's definition of 'gluten-free', before it is conditioned in cask to meet the Campaign for Real Ale's (CAMRA) definition of cask ale.