Munchable

Is stout gluten free?

No, and here is why

Munchable reads stout as beer, and the gluten list names beer as a grain or as something made from one, so stout is an avoid for coeliac disease wherever it appears on the label. There is no dose grading on this axis: the legal threshold for a gluten-free claim is 20 mg/kg, which is not a quantity an ingredients list can show, so stout ninth on the list is flagged exactly as firmly as stout first.

On a real product, the reason Munchable shows reads: Contains stout, a gluten grain

What Munchable checks for Coeliac disease

  • Wheat and every name for it: semolina, couscous, bulgur, durum, spelt, kamut, einkorn, emmer, farro, seitan
  • Barley and rye, including malt, malt extract, malt flavouring and malt vinegar
  • Wheat starch, wheat protein and wheat bran, which the taxonomy files away from the grain
  • Bread, breadcrumbs, rusk, panko, pasta, noodles, dough, pastry, biscuits, cake, wafers, pretzels and beer
  • Oats, oat milk and muesli as a caution, cleared by a gluten-free claim
  • The words that name a form rather than a grain: tortilla, soba, brewer’s yeast
  • The pack’s own gluten-free claim, attributed to the manufacturer
  • The printed "Contains" and "may contain" lines, read independently of the ingredients
  • Rice, maize, buckwheat, quinoa, millet, sorghum, teff and polenta left alone, along with the wheat glucose syrups that EU law exempts

The full reasoning, and the evidence behind it, is in the Coeliac disease guide. For every word at once, there is the hidden gluten word list.

Other ingredients Munchable reads for Coeliac disease

The catch with reading labels yourself

Knowing that stout is a problem is the easy part. Finding it is the hard part: it hides behind wordings that do not look like it, it matters more near the top of the list than the bottom, and a product you have bought for years quietly reformulates. That is the job Munchable does in the aisle, in about a second, from the barcode.

Check it in the shop, not at home

Point your phone at the barcode and Munchable reads the ingredients list for you, before it goes in the basket.