Ballarat's Rebellion Brewing has taken home the gong for the world's best gluten-free beer from the World Beer Awards.
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Rebellion won the award for its O'Brien Belgian Ale a gluten-free beer that is brewed using ancient grains rather than wheat or barley.
The award comes on the back of six gold medals at the Australian International Beer Awards for the Ballarat brewery.
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The Belgian Ale has been a popular autumn seasonal brew for Rebellion for the past eight years and has candy sugar added to the sorghum and millet malts, giving the beer a slightly sweet and warming ale with a subtle spice, earth and fruit character.
Rebellion Brewing founder and managing director John O'Brien said the award was vindication for 16 years of hard work to make the best beers possible.
"A Belgian blonde ale is a fairly popular style and we tried to emulate that style in a gluten-free fashion and we think we've hit the nail on the head with that one because it's won several big awards, a couple of Australian International Beer Award gold medals and now a World Beer Award," he said.
"We just want to make the best beers we can and we want to make them gluten free so that people like myself with coeliac disease can enjoy them, but we're confident and in fact, we know that there are people out there who can drink gluten beers, but quite happily drink our beers because they just love the flavour of them."
Mr O'Brien, who started the brewery in 2005 after being diagnosed with coeliac disease, said the award was a credit to the Ballarat community as well.
"I just want to give a shout out to all the people in Ballarat and all our local suppliers and our local tradies that help us because it's not just us making beers, there's a whole support network behind us," he said.
"We tap into a lot of people in and around Ballarat and we try and use local people wherever we can to help us keep our business going and making these beers, so it's a community effort as well as our individual effort."
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