I have an article coming out next month in New Brewer magazine about gluten-free beers, so I’ve been watching what’s been going on with this kind of beer for many months. In case you’ve missed this growing phenomenon, celiac disease now effects close to 1% of the U.S. population and people with the disease can’t properly digest glutens, a protein in many common grains, including wheat and barley. This means no bread, pizza, pasta or, most importantly, beer. Here and abroad, there is increasing interest in producing a beer that’s both gluten-free and tastes similar to beer. To date, only a handful of American brewers are making one, with several more in Europe and Australia.

My son, Porter, is autistic and many kids with ASD also have some stomach problems similar to those associated with celiac sufferers. As a result, both are put on gluten-free diets with generally positive effects. Over the past summer, I was talking with Dr. Michael Lewis, who pioneered the brewing sciences program at U.C. Davis, about these beers. He mentioned that Anheuser-Busch was also working on a gluten-free beer and suggested a few people there I should talk to about it. Try as I might, I could not penetrate A-B’s bureaucracy beyond a tersely-worded statement from their P.R. department. They seemed genuinely surprised that I even knew about, despite the fact that Miller’s BrewBlog broke the story in early August that A-B had filed a label registration in Missouri for the beer, called Red Bridge Sorghum Beer, and test batch bottles reportedly had been quietly sampled at MBAA meetings. All Anheuser-Busch was willing to say on the matter was the following:

Our goal at Anheuser-Busch is to make sure every consumer can enjoy the kind of beer they feel best about — it’s that simple. That’s why our brewmasters are continually exploring and brewing a variety of beer styles year round. We are currently brewing a beer made with sorghum and without barley, wheat or oats and we’re still developing the final product.

They were unwilling to provide a sample, show me a label, allow me to speak to the person I knew to be working on it, nada. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to include much in the article. This despite the fact that I had seen and tasted a test bottle, seen a label mock-up, and knew they’d both registered the name and picked up the domain name redbridgebeer.com on July 12. To hear the P.R. flacks tell the tale, it was years away from being on store shelves, if ever.

So it was with a gentle smirk that I received the news today — a rumor at best, from an anonymous source — that A-B would be rolling out Red Bridge Sorghum Beer nationally (not in a test market) on December 18. Is it true? I’ll let you know in just under two months.

This mock-up may or may not be the label for A-B’s new gluten-free beer, Red Bridge.