Vegan update - Magic Rock Brewing
Just to keep you all up to date with our vegan friendly beers…..
Since the commissioning of our centrifuge in December 2016, the vast majority of beer produced at Magic Rock is now vegan-friendly. The exception to this is our cask beer which we still add isinglass to upon racking (to satisfy local preference for super clarity) and any beers which contain non-vegan ingredients, for example the use of heather honey in Cross-Pollination.
There has been a little confusion with customers to what the centrifuge helps us to do. It’s not a magical ‘de-veganizer’, it’s a processing aid which allows us to pull proteins, hop matter and yeast out of the beer by ‘spinning’ the beer at high speed. It’s a much less aggressive process on the beer than filtering which tends to strip flavour and allows us to clarify the beer to pre-determined levels, nice and clear for lagers, hazier for pales ales and IPA’s etc…
It allows us to remove anything that negatively affects the beer that’s left in after fermentation (e.g. dead yeast cells) but to keep the desired aroma and flavour compounds in the beer. It also means the body and texture of the beer isn’t negatively impacted (in styles where that’s important) as it can be through filtration. Most importantly for vegans it means we no longer have to use non vegan-friendly isinglass for clarification of the beer.
We have updated the information on our website for each individual beer, so you can now search our site to see if it is vegan friendly. For extra reassurance, any keg or can beers with ‘gyle’ number of 1277 or higher have been produced without the use of finings and are vegan friendly (unless non vegan products have been added). Gyle 1277 was the first of our beers to go through the centrifuge.
The gyle number refers to a brew number, and is a four digit number that can be found on the base of the can OR on the keg label. For kegged products please ask your friendly bar tender to check the gyle before ordering.
In regards to labelling on packaging, we are in the process of adding in the Vegan Society logo to our core cans, however this may take a little while as they are printed in big batches and we need to wait for re-prints to add in the logo.
As far as the big 500ml cans and small batch runs we have stated ‘Registered by the Vegan Society’ on the side of the can.
We hope this makes it clearer for enquiries going forward. In celebration of our ‘vegan-ness’ the Taproom will be hosting a full month of vegan food traders in June.
Vegan Month / Street Food Traders at Magic Rock Tap
2nd, 3rd, 4th June – Mother May I
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Saturday 3rd June / Vegan Food and Drink Festival (12pm-9pm) / Facebook event
Yakumama, Wah wahs, Street Cleaver, Honest Crust Wood Fired Pizza, Mother May I, Noisette Bakehouse
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9th, 10th, 11th June – Make No Bones
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16th, 17th, 18th June – The Vegan Grindhouse by Vegan Vox
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23rd, 24th, 25th June – Pomodoro E Basilico
