ALT Brew’s innovative, gluten-free beer allows more people to enjoy an old Wisconsin tradition

Trevor Easton didn’t want to make his wife sick.

But while he home brewed a batch of beer, milled barley dust flew into the air and settled into cabinets and appliances used for cooking. As a result, Easton spent hours deep cleaning the kitchen.

He had realized even a trace amount of barley from his longtime hobby could now give his wife a reaction, and he needed to change the way he brewed or stop completely.

“That was the last batch I did with wheat, barley and rye in it,” Easton says.

Wisconsin craft beer had always been something that Trevor and his wife, Maureen, enjoyed together until Maureen realized she needed to give up gluten — which meant giving up beer.

For Maureen and others facing a gluten-free diagnosis, making the necessary dietary changes to omit gluten means a challenging search for alternatives to their favorite foods and drinks. Easton continued experimenting with home brewing to come up with a way to show Wisconsin that beer can taste great even without gluten, and he brought that passion for his beer — and his wife — to the gluten-free brews of ALT Brew in 2014.

What is life like for a Wisconsinite with celiac disease? For most, it means giving up deep-fried cheese curds, cream puffs, Friday’s battered fish fry and, of course, beer.

These foods contain gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. If a person with celiac disease consumes gluten, it triggers an abnormal immune reaction, says Kelley Wilson, a registered dietician at the UW Health Digestive Center. This reaction damages the lining of the small intestine and flattens the tissues that absorb vitamins and minerals.

There is no medication or supplement to manage the digestive symptoms and long-term nutrient deficiencies from celiac disease — the only remedy is sticking to a permanently gluten-free diet.

“It’s life-changing in the way that their diet does change significantly,” Wilson says.

For people with celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, going strictly gluten-free prevents symptoms such as abdominal pain, digestive issues and further complications.

While Wilson only serves an adult patient population, she says the diagnosis can happen at any time in a person’s life. She says celiac disease tends to run in families, and typically individuals with the disease carry one or both of the genes that can be passed onto future generations.

According to 2010 data from the Gluten Intolerance Group of East Central Wisconsin, 1 in 133 people in the United States has celiac disease.

Maureen had experienced stomach issues for most of her life, but she wasn’t diagnosed with celiac disease until 2007 when she was 25 years old — after her brother and sister had received the same diagnosis.

While celiac disease involves many lifestyle changes to avoid gluten contamination, Maureen recalls craft beer as the hardest thing to replace.

“I didn’t really want to know that it was the diagnosis, because I knew how drastically I would have to change my life and that I had to give up beer, which was something Trevor and I really did enjoy together,” Maureen says.

Since college, the Eastons have shared a mutual interest in drinking different styles of craft beer. Maureen even stepped in to help him brew from time to time.

“We both grew up here in Wisconsin, and we both independently were craft beer lovers, and then we started dating,” Maureen says. “In the Madison area, there’s a beer culture.”

Now the beer culture can be enjoyed by more people in Madison, including people with celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. ALT Brew is currently the only dedicated gluten-free brewery in Wisconsin, and 1 of 7 in the country to exclusively brew gluten-free beer on gluten-free equipment.

Trevor Easton has been a longtime fan of homebrewing.

Easton’s interest in brewing beer sparked when he first picked up a home-brew supply kit with his college roommate at a Copps grocery store in 2000. At the time, he was pursuing a degree in industrial engineering at UW–Madison and actively brewing all-grain batches of beer as much as his class schedule would allow. Brewing his own beer in college did not generate a profit, but it led to many successful batches that he shared with friends and grew his lifelong passion for beer.

Wisconsin has a long, rich brewing history, with innovation often generated by home brewers.

“Brewers have become far more adventurous in using nontraditional ingredients, so the creative ability of brewers that we have today encourages more experimentation with gluten-free ingredients, so I think it goes hand-in-hand with expanding the creative abilities of brewers in general,” says Mark Garthwaite, executive director of the Wisconsin Brewers Guild.

Story continues below map.

As an early home brewer, Easton picked up books and magazines on how to brew and browsed the internet to learn as much as possible about beer. Brewing regular beer involves mixing barley with water, then boiling the liquid, stirring in hops, adding yeast and allowing it to ferment.

“Generally, beer is made with malted barley, and it’s difficult to replicate that malted barley flavor and some of the body and mouth-feel that malt barley lends to the beer,” Garthwaite says. “That’s the challenge that someone like Trevor has really embraced, and he’s been very successful at using gluten-free ingredients that mimic that full malted barley flavor and presence.”

Brewing beer with gluten-free ingredients was especially challenging since there was not a how-to book already published about it. Easton surfed the web, only to discover a single informative resource from Australia. He wanted to steer away from the typical gluten-free beer made from 100 percent sorghum grain, so he looked at the structure of other products on the market.

“We noticed that [gluten-free] breads had a lot of different grains in them so that it was kind of a balanced blend,” Easton says. “So, on the home brewing side of it, we really took that approach and brought in a lot of different gluten-free grains.”

Once Easton found a process to properly mill the gluten-free grains, he developed a farmhouse ale using a Belgian yeast and two types of hops for a refreshing, slightly bitter beer with notes of crisp apple. Then, there was a blonde IPA called “Hollywood Nights” with a hoppy, herbal flavor and notes of citrus to smooth the bitterness. For a darker beer, he developed a copper ale with roasted millet for a malty and chocolaty profile.

“He did a lot of research on how to get the flavor profile to act a certain way and all the chemical reactions he needed for it to go the way he wanted,” Maureen says. “It was awesome to be able to try a beer that actually tasted like a craft beer.”

Over the years, he’s been using a variety of ingredients such as honey, roasted pumpkin, Belgian sugar and an Ethiopian grain called teff to develop other seasonal and limited edition flavor profiles.

While current trends in the beer scene include barrel-aging and sour beer making, gluten-free beer can bring not only a unique flavor profile, but also inclusiveness for people with gluten intolerance or celiac disease.

“Folks who cannot tolerate gluten and really like beer feel like they’re missing what was once one of their favorite beverages,” Garthwaite says. “I think there is a new awareness of gluten intolerance that has led to people who really feel that they wanted to find a way to make a beverage that tastes exactly like beer to meet that niche.”

When the Eastons moved back to Wisconsin from Chicago in 2012, Trevor joined the Madison Home Brewers and Tasters Guild to continue learning about the beer scene and how to shift into the commercial industry. There, he met Page Buchanan, the owner of House of Brews. Buchanan needed help at his community-supported brewery, so he took on Easton and Henry Schwartz of Mobcraft Beer Brewery as brewing assistants for nine months.

“It was kind of cool to be able to talk with them, having all that depth and knowledge,” Easton says. “To talk to all these different brewers while formulating your own recipes is a huge asset and very helpful to propelling the style and making the beer better very quickly.”

This experience gave him newfound insight on commercial brewing. Instead of home brewing many different styles, he learned how to focus his efforts brewing one recipe over and over again to crisp perfection.

Easton initially started commercially self-distributing his gluten-free brews to local liquor stores and taverns out of the back of his truck in 2014. At the time, he was leasing an enclosed room that was intended to be a recipe design lab for House of Brews, from Buchanan. To make sure the nearly 130-square-foot space was totally gluten free, he installed a filter with positive pressure to ensure that barley could not flow inside.

But their small operation couldn’t keep up. To meet the increasing demand for ALT Brew in Madison and across the state, they decided to expand, one day hoping to distribute to the entire Midwest.

In 2016, Easton opened the ALT Brew taproom and brewery in a 5,800-square-foot space on Madison’s east side. He still makes his beer in one-barrel batches on the same one-barrel system, and then fills and caps 22-ounce bottles by hand. (A one-barrel batch is 330 12-ounce beers.)

“We brew a batch and it starts at that size, then we do double batching where we’ll brew one batch, get the yeast kicked off and then brew another batch into it,” Easton says. “We can kind of have two batches going at the same time and the same place.”

ALT Brew has a total of eight one-barrel fermenters and seven two-barrel fermenters that are consistently full, and Easton usually brews between 4 to 6 times a week.

When he first decided to take on the challenge of brewing gluten-free beer that Maureen could enjoy in 2007, he spent six months dumping beer down the drain. But the trial and error to perfect the recipe paid off, and he developed his first five-gallon batch of ALT Brew’s Rustic Badger Farmhouse Ale — which his friends quickly depleted. In 2016, Easton also gained national recognition at the Great American Beer Festival for his Copperhead Ale, scoring a silver medal for excellence in taste, aroma and appearance.

And for Maureen, the change in ingredients was the ultimate act of love that tasted just like what she had been missing.

“Now, I can experience beer just like other people with celiac and gluten sensitivity,” Maureen says. “We have this opportunity now to experience the whole craft beer movement we are otherwise excluded from.”

Trina is a senior majoring in journalism, with a focus in reporting and strategic communication, with a certificate in sustainability.

Outside of Curb, Trina loves to encourage her friends to recycle, spread positive vibes and wear bright lipstick. She also serves as the vice president of the senior class, is the associate editor of the Office of Sustainability newsletter and hosts an environmental talkshow for WSUM.

After graduation, Trina hopes to continue giving a voice to the environment and eventually become a professor. Whatever she does, though, there are sure to be a few laughs along the way.