I found out in the past week that the new Mike’s Lite Hard Lemonade was gluten-free!  How exciting is this?  I knew that Aaron was stopping at the store on the way home, so I called him to see if he could pick me up some.  He was able to find it right away and it even says “Gluten-Free” right on the front! 

I was curious as to what the ingredients were since previously Mike’s had been a “malt beverage”, which I have always been told is not gluten-free.  This is the info I found on their website:

mike’s lite hard lemonade® is new and on the loose. It has a crisp, light and refreshing taste— and it’s bursting with invigorating, all-natural flavors and sweeteners, but with even fewer calories than the leading light beer*. And it’s gluten-free. This stuff’s not your regular run-of-the-mill lemonade. So crowd your fridge with flavor by stocking up on some mike’s lite hard lemonade® and mike’s lite hard cranberry lemonade®.

Mike’s Hard Lemonade Co. products available in the US are made with a premium malt base (fermented barley and hops like traditional beer) that is then further processed using a highly specialized, multi-stage filtration process. Highly sensitive tests from an independent lab analysis indicate that mike’s® products do not contain any traces of gluten protein (including hordein).

I was still confused, so I sent an email off toe Mike’s and I got this response

Hi Kim,

Thank you so much for writing in and our sincere apologies for the delay in getting back to you.  Our ingredient list is proprietary information but we have updated the gluten section of the website if you have questions about the gluten free testing.  Check out the"talk to us" section of www.mikeshard.com and if you have questions that it doesn’t answer for you please let us know.  Thanks!

Cheers,

Mike’s Consumer Relations

That didn’t really help all that much, but Tiffany Janes from Celiac-Disease.com, placed a call to Mike’s and got a little more information.  You can read all about it here. 

Here is the most important part from Tiffany’s post:

To my surprise, I found out the barley malt the company is using to make their malt beverages has been gluten-free since 2005.

Interesting.  So, it seems as if all of their beverages are gluten-free, but they have only started to label the Lite Hard varieties, which come in Lemonade & Cranberry Lemonade.

I bet you want to know what I thought of the Mike’s Lite Hard Lemonade, right?  While it was a little sweet, it was very light & refreshing and only has 109 calories per bottle.  I am used to drinking dryer wines, so that may be why I found the drink so sweet.  I had no ill effects after drinking the Lite Hard Lemonade and look forward to trying the cranberry lemonade. 

Have you tried Mike’s Lite Hard Lemonade?  If so, what did you think?  Would you try the other varieties that are “gluten-free”, but aren’t labeled as such?