How Is Guinness Making Its Beer Vegan?
Same Guinness, different filtration method Morabito92 via Wikimedia Commons If you’re a vegan or strict vegetarian and you’ve done your research, you have probably been steering clear of Guinness. That’s because, in order to make the 256-year-old Irish stout many of us know and love, brewers use a product called "isinglass" that is made from dried fish bladders. Now, after years of pressure from consumers, Guinness has announced that it will no longer use isinglass to filter its beer, and plans to build a new filtration system for that purpose in 2016. What sort of filtration system might that be, and why has it taken this long to start using it? It’s important to know why Guinness needs to be filtered in the first place. During the beer’s fermentation, yeast gobbles up its...