Toast Ale x Tap Social Movement

26th February 2019

Toast Ale x Tap Social Movement

We’ve teamed up with Oxford-based brewery Tap Social Movement for our latest collaboration brew to demonstrates the role craft beer can play in creating, empowering and uniting communities to tackle social challenges.

 

Tap Social Movement provides work experience opportunities and tangible skills for people with criminal records, helping to rehabilitate them towards a life of successful employment. In addition to being involved in the brewing process, people are able to use their skills for other aspects of the business. For example, the artwork for this new beer will be developed by inmates at HMP Huntercombe.

 

The beer, a Rye based IPA, smoked over oak wood chips, is called 28 Days – the number of days that an inmate is “stood down” (loses privileges) if they’re caught using bread to brew beer in prison. Yep, it’s a real thing, and a pretty neat way of tying together our social missions.

 

For the collaboration beer, we’ve upcycled 4,650 slices (140kg) of surplus bread from Oxford Food Bank, a local charity collecting fresh, unsold food from supermarkets and redistributing to vulnerable individuals throughout the community. Incredibly, bread is over-produced at such a large scale that more is donated to them than can be redistributed. In addition to the sheer abundance, the difficulty storing bread for any period of time means that charities often end up with a waste problem of their own. By using it to produce beer, the resources can be recovered, and the proceeds will donated back to Oxford Food Bank.

 

We are proud to collaborate with Tap Social Movement, and to support the Oxford Food Bank, by creating a great tasting beer that empowers drinkers to support such important causes. It shows that positive solutions exist to complicated, entrenched problems. The beer will be launched on Friday 8th March at Tap Social Movement’s tap room in Oxford. If you’re local, head down and be a beer-drinking activist for these important social issues.