Craft beers: Review and guides

The beer produced with the surplus bread: the Toast Ale

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Written by EFW Staff

Toast Ale: from the surplus bread to beer

Toast Ale, the end of the food waste! It is the slogan of a characteristic beer, the first in United Kingdom, to be produced from the surplus bread. A smart and anti-waste idea from the mind of Tristam Stuart, an English activist who fight, for years, against the food waste, and together with the Hackney Brewery transformed his idea into reality. It is a little extravagant, but efficient: produce high-quality beer from the surplus bread.

Hakney uses the surplus bread from bakeries and delicatessen department, transforming it in a new type of food, instead of throwing it in the rubbish. 15 million are the tons of wasted bread in the United Kingdom every year and 24 million are the slices of bread threw in the rubbish of the English, Welsh and Scottish houses. Thus, the 44% of the produced bread is thrown away, and this useful waste gave to Tristam Stuart the idea to recycle it in the beer production, a production that starts from ethic motivations, not avoiding taste and flavour.

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How is the Toast Ale produced?

The process is easier than you can think. The Hakney Brewery collect the unsold bread at the end of the day from bakeries, crust ends of loaves that are automatically discarded by sandwich manufacturers and the fresh surplus from the producers of baked products; the bread is cut in slices, toasted and transformed in big croutons, then mixed with the malted barley, hop and yeasts. Once fermented the beer is bottled and sold, also online, all over Europe.

The Toast Ale is a pleasant beer with caramel notes given from the toasting that balance the bitter hops, giving a malty taste similar to amber ales and wheat beers.

Toast Ale: taste and ethic

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This unique beer, in addition to the excellent premises of reducing the food waste, has also another virtue. Profits of the sales, in fact, are given to charity to Feedback, an environmental organization, active in the fight against waste at every level of the food system to reduce the environmental impact and the problems related to malnutrition.

To not sell this product anymore would be the greatest victory for the producers of Toast Ale, it would mean the real reduction of the wastes in the food industry and in the houses of the people.

 

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EFW Staff