Can You Drink Sake If You're Gluten-Free?

Sake is made from rice and fermented to make an alcoholic beverage, originating from Japan. Find out whether sake is safe on a gluten free diet below.

Is Sake Gluten Free?

Sake is not always gluten-free, even though it's brewed from fermented rice. Some makers of sake use ingredients that come into contact with gluten grains, potentially making the sake problematic, especially for people who are particularly sensitive to trace gluten.

Sake Ingredients

Sake is a traditional Japanese alcoholic beverage. The best traditional sake is made from three ingredients: rice, purified water and a form of mold called koji. When the three are blended, the koji ferments the rice, resulting in the alcohol-containing rice wine we know as sake.

Gluten in Koji Mold

Koji (usually the fungus Aspergillus oryzae) can be grown at home or commercially on a variety of substances, including rice and barley. Barley, in fact, is said to make a particularly good substrate for growing koji.

The barley wouldn't be added directly to the rice in the fermentation process, but it's possible that a very minute amount would stick with the koji following the koji growth stage and would, therefore, make it into the mixture to be fermented. This is a similar problem to one that occurs in other products, notably Rice Dream rice-based milk.

This process involving barley doesn't necessarily mean sake isn't safe. It's important to note that not every sake manufacturer uses gluten-containing ingredients to make the koji that goes into sake.

However, some people react to less gluten than is legally allowed in "gluten-free"-labeled foods. For example, some people have trouble with mushrooms, which are frequently grown on gluten grains, while lots of people find that soy is cross-contaminated with too much gluten for them.

There's actually a good parallel between sake and blue cheese when it comes to gluten: the mold used to create blue cheese can be grown on gluten grains, and some particularly sensitive people with celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity react to blue cheese for that reason.

Flour in Sake

Some home sake brewing instructions call for a small amount of toasted wheat flour to be used in the mixture that's added to the rice for fermentation, but it's not clear whether any commercial sake brewing operations would add wheat flour to their mixtures.

Since home-brew recipes try to mimic the taste of traditional sakes on the market, it's a risk (albeit one that's difficult to quantify). It can be difficult to determine ingredients in commercially-produced non-premium sake, but you can try contacting the manufacturer to ask if problematic ingredients are used.

Grain-Based Alcohol

In addition, some sake brands can include a small amount of grain-based distilled alcohol, which may bother those who react to gluten-grain-derived alcoholic beverages.

Is Sake Safe?

At this point, you're probably wondering if you can safely drink sake and whether it's possible to find a sake that's sufficiently gluten-free for you. There's actually some good news.

This group of people constitutes the majority of those with celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and for them, sake can make a good substitute for gluten-containing alcoholic beverages like beer.

However, if you're in the minority of people who react to things like mushrooms and edamame, you should steer clear of sake unless you can find a manufacturer that doesn't use barley at all as part of the brewing process.

If you avoid alcohol that's been distilled from gluten grains, choose only sake that's labeled junmai or junmai-shu—this is considered pure sake, with nothing but rice added to the fermentation mixture and no added alcohol. Other forms of sake include honjozo-shu (includes a small amount of distilled alcohol), and ginjo-shu and daiginjo-shu (both of which may or may not contain distilled alcohol.