Brewdog vs Toast
6th October 2020
Here's to a new collaboration beer, brewed with Brewdog, as part of our mission to reduce food waste.
It's a Sliced Heist!
Sliced Heist is a 4.2% Helles-style Lager that uses surplus bread, malted barley and traditional European hops. It’s a hazy, golden colour and has a soft, bready malt character with floral and spicy notes.
The sliced bread is from Bradgate Bakery, who we've worked with on many brews in the past. It's the heel ends of the loaf, the by-product of commercial sandwich production. By using it to brew, we're preventing the bread from being wasted whilst using less malt (which has a pretty big environmental footprint).
In line with Toast’s model of donating profits to charity, 12p from every can will go to Feedback to support their environmental campaigning work.
Collaboration is the future.
We set out with an ambition to make the brewing industry circular, to eliminate bread waste and reduce the use of virgin natural resources. Food production is the biggest contributor to climate change and biodiversity loss, but one-third of all food is wasted. We're here to change that. And we need everyone to be part of the change.
We actively collaborate with breweries all over the world to bring them on the journey with us. We've worked directly with over 50 breweries, from our neighbours Fourpure, to brew partners in the US, Brazil, South Africa, Iceland and the Netherlands.
We've influenced many more breweries to follow our lead and use surplus bread in their beer production. That includes established brewers like Adnams, Tiny Rebel and Saltaire working with UK supermarkets. It also includes new brewery start-ups like UK-based Crumbs and, on the other side of the world, the Citizen Collective in New Zealand.
A Toast to Brewdog.
We first worked with Brewdog in October 2019.
Together with BD's Tower Hill Outpost, we brewed a Belgian-style Pumpkin Dubbel using surplus bread and pumpkins leftover from Halloween. It was sold on tap across Brewdog bars in London to support the charity Hubbub. Read more about that ghoulish brew.
Since then we've been talking to James Watt, Brewdog's Captain, about helping them to achieve their sustainability ambitions. A collaboration seemed like a good place to start.
Our head brewer Stuart has been advising JK, Brewdog's Head of Beer Development. He's shared our experience of bread preparation techniques and technical advice about brewing with bread. For brewers new to using bread as an ingredient, the challenges include learning how to get as much starch as possible from the bread – to extract maximum sugars for fermentation - and how to prevent a stuck mash.
Ultimately, it's about creating a great-tasting beer (that does the world of good).
Change is brewing.
We're proud to have inspired a business as big as Brewdog to use surplus bread in their grain bill, with this collaboration introducing the idea of brewing with bread to Brewdog HQ.
Now it's about scaling. We've continued to advise them on brewing bigger batches as they prepare to launch MEGA (Make Earth Great Again), a beer brewed with surplus bread. We expect that will happen quickly - Brewdog seems to move in dog years.
But we also need more changemaking breweries to join us. We hope that with a mainstream multi-national business like Brewdog on board, we might be heading for a tipping point. And we're hopeful we are.
Cheers.
