vegan Beers

Which Gun beers are vegan?

Currently 7 of the 8 beers in our core range are Vegan. The only beer that isn’t vegan is our Parabellum Milk Stout.
The beers in our Smallbatch range do also tend to be vegan, but check on the individual beer pages to make sure.

why isn’t all beer vegan anyway?

Two broad reasons, the first cosmetic:
Beer is naturally hazy. Traditionally, to help clear the beer quickly for serving in a pub, cask ales have a fining agent added to them. Believe it or not this agent is made from the swim bladders of fish (yep. fish.), which is why a lot of beer can't be classed as vegan. We think that adding fish swim bladders to our beers isn’t the way to go.
The other reason is to do with balance:
Both hops and some (generally dark) roasted malts, impart bitterness to a beer. To balance this, brewers can add sugar, but it has to be the right sort of sugar. If you added normal table sugar to a fermenting beer, the yeast would start to eat it, resulting in more CO2 and alcohol being produced - no sweetness would remain. Lactose sugar however, is a more complex sugar that the yeast can’t break down, and can therefore be used to sweeten beer. As the name suggests, Lactose Sugar is made from milk (hence the “Milk” in a Milk Stout).

Award winning vegan beers

Our beers have won legions of awards over the years (you can view the full list here) but some notable recent awards for two of our vegan (and Gluten Free beers) are:

Numb Angel Lager 4% - Two Stars in the 2022 Great Taste Awards & Gold Award at the 2020 Free From Awards (often described as The Oscars of the Gluten Free world)

Scaramanga 3.9% Extra Pale - 2 Stars at the 2019 Great Taste Awards