Beer has a special place among the many foods and beverages which are problematic for individuals with diabetes. Enjoy a number of cans or pints and the carbohydrate content can push your blood sugar way up … just before the alcohol brings you back down with a thud. While there are lower-carb beers available, it’s mostly “lite” megabrews, the variety of stuff that the beer lover might find thin and tasteless.

As exciting because the explosion of the craft beer industry has been, those delicious, lovingly-made microbrews might be much more trouble. The more flavorful the beer, the upper the carbohydrate count is prone to be. And the smaller the brewery, the less likely you’ll have any idea what number of carbs are in a bottle.

Beer lover Seán Deeney had never given much thought to beer’s sugar content until May 2020. That’s when, within the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

“I only figured that out because I’d just been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease a few months before, in February. So, it was not a fantastic 12 months.”

Seán, age 23, lives in Dublin. He’s just accomplished his university degree. And despite the incredible bad health luck, he’s bounced back pretty quickly.

His transition to life with diabetes was smooth partially because he was already fairly aware of the disease: his brother James had also been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, only a number of years previous.

Actually, it was James that first alerted Seán to the likely meaning of his symptoms. James used his own blood sugar meter on his brother, and “it was way up, above 20 mmol/L [360 mg/dL].” By the point Seán went into the hospital, he was within the beginnings of ketoacidosis.

“But it surely wasn’t even too bad. I form of had a general idea of all of the stuff you’ve gotten to do, how you are taking insulin, the way you check your blood sugars. And it was helpful to have someone I could ask on a regular basis.”

The 2 had already been collaborating on homebrewed beers, and with each now sharing notes on diabetes management, they were sure to begin talking about diabetes-friendly beer.

“My brother has been brewing his own beer for years, and he worked in a brewery as well, Carlingford Brewing Co. We’ve made all forms of forms of beers. Principally anything you possibly can consider, we’ve at the least made an attempt at doing.”

“It was only a number of months ago that I began really liking these brut beers. It’s a very dry sort of beer, so it isn’t very sweet, and I’d desired to do one for some time, so we looked up how you truly go about doing them. But we didn’t know before we looked it up that there was almost no sugar in them.”

“It seems it’s mainly much like a standard beer, except you place in glucoamylase, an enzyme that breaks down the complex sugars into more basic sugars.”

“Normally, the rationale that the beers have sugar in them – which is what’s going to mess along with your blood sugar levels – is that there are unfermentable sugars that remain within the beer, sugars that the yeast isn’t capable of convert into alcohol. It’s only a byproduct of the way you make it. But this enzyme glucoamylase actually breaks down these unfermentable sugars and makes them into fermentable sugars, so the yeast can convert the entire sugar into alcohol, and there can be no sugar left within the beer in any respect.

“We were taking a look at this and considering, ‘If there’s no sugar left within the beer, surely it shouldn’t affect your glucose levels.’ So we tried one out, and it worked! You possibly can go and drink eight pints of it and it won’t affect your blood sugars in any respect. Neither myself nor my brother has seen levels rising from drinking it.”

A warning – please don’t take this as an endorsement to drink eight pints of beer, which might be a nasty idea, diabetes or not. Seán (who continues to be within the honeymoon period) and James have never noticed their blood sugars drop after drinking beer, but your experience may significantly vary. It’s well-known that alcohol, which prevents the liver from releasing glucose the way in which it normally does, could cause blood sugar drops and dangerous hypoglycemia, especially when taken in excess. I cautioned to Seán that his own experience might change over time, too.

To be clear, Seán hasn’t had his beer scientifically analyzed or anything. He’s not a chemist. But he’s convinced that his brut homebrew has significantly less sugar than every other beer style he’s tried, if not absolutely zero. It’s been nothing but regular blood sugar lines for each brothers:

“We each have CGMs. He has the Dexcom, I even have the Libre. You possibly can really see the lines, and it just won’t go up in any respect.”

Brut beers are frequently done in a clean, bitter, highly fizzy IPA style, almost like a beery champagne, but Seán has tried the glucoamylase in other recipes as well.

“Normally it’s only a pale ale or IPA that individuals put this enzyme into. But I actually like German wheat beers. So I made a decision I’d attempt to make a wheat beer with this enzyme as well.”

“It did exactly what it was presupposed to do. You find yourself with no sugar at the tip, and a very tasty beer. So I’ve been doing it with a number of others – a rye, and a Kolsch, and all of the sugars completely ferment out.”

“We’ve had some fun in naming them as well. The primary one, the IPA style, we call it Insulin, since it keeps the degrees down. The wheat that I wish to make we now have now called Diawheaties.”

And his non-diabetic friends approve:

“Everyone seems to prefer it. They have a tendency to be quite nice, easy-drinking beers. We wouldn’t make them only for the zero sugar in the event that they were no good. They’re pretty much as good as the traditional beers.”

“It’s really handy. It’s one less thing to fret about.”