So I see a lot of people worried about alcohol that is suitable for vegans (SFV). I get this feeling that a lot of vegans won't drink certain beers (or wine) if they do not have the VEGAN label on them.
So let's get this topic clear: beer (and wine) are naturally vegan products, it's like saying "vegan bread" or "vegan orange juice".
Beer is usually just water, malt, yeast and hops, so please stop calling it vegan beer! It's beer.
What happens is that some beers are filtered using fish bladder (isinglass), this usually only happens in mass production beers (read more here). Isinglass is used to quicken a natural process, so that the beer is ready quicker and therefore out in the pubs faster to make money asap. This is not something that is required, or that you need to veganise or find a better alternative.
So if you look at craft beers; beer brewed in small batches, people who brew beer in the traditional way, with no short cuts and no chemicals you will see that the ingredients usually list only water,malt, hops and yeast.
Of course craft beer makers are very creative and nowadays you have different flavored beers such as: oyster beers where they place around 5 oysters at the bottom of the cask to give it flavor; or chocolate milk stout which usually contains lactose because lactose does not get fermented by most yeasts during brewing, so this can be used to sweeten stout beer types resulting in a milk stout or a cream stout... but really other than this beer usually is vegan.
However going back to known beer brands:
please check out this site whenever in doubt www.barnivore.com
and give Craft Beers a try; your taste buds will thank you and you will taste so many different kinds of hops that you will never want a mass production beer again !
