A total of 19,000 slices of surplus bakery bread have got a new lease of life in the UK, as beer to be sold on supermarket shelves.
Toast Brewing has teamed up with Welsh craft brewery Tiny Rebel, Wales’ largest independent craft brewery, to launch the brew exclusively at Co-op stores.
It’s part of Toast’s wider mission to tackle food waste, which has already seen the company save more than 3 million slices of surplus bread since it began brewing in 2016, while freeing up 71 acres of agricultural land by reducing demand for barley.
In the UK, an eye-watering 20 million slices of bread are wasted every single day. Across the entire supply chain, from bakeries and sandwich factories to retailers and households, nearly half (44 per cent) of all bread produced ends up being discarded.
That’s millions of loaves going to waste each week, contributing to food waste and the environmental costs of producing food that’s never eaten.
The surplus bread replaces some of the malted barley usually used in brewing, cutting the beer’s environmental impact by reducing the land, water and energy needed to grow new crops. The brewers also used Mosaic and ID-7 – varieties of aromatic hops – to add bold notes of pineapple and a bright citrus zing to the finished brew.
A Brewing Tradition Reimagined
Bread, in fact, has been linked to beer-making for millennia. Around 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, the Sumerians – the earliest known civilisation in what is now Iraq – were already brewing beer using loaves of twice-baked barley bread to provide sugars for fermentation.
Beer was so important in Sumerian daily life that the pictograph for it appears frequently in their written records. Archaeologists have also uncovered an ancient recipe for beer, inscribed on a clay tablet and written as a poem to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. The brew itself was likely much thicker than modern beer, more like a porridge, with plenty of residual lumps.
But fear not: this modern collaboration may also use bread as a key ingredient, but the result will be crisp, refreshing, and far from porridge-like.
It is the first release in Toast’s Breaking Bread series, a line of limited-edition collaborations with UK breweries, including future brews with Adnams and Northern Monk.
Rob Wilson, co-founder at Toast Brewing, said: ‘This beer series is all about connecting people across the bar, across the brewing industry, and across communities to raise a toast to planet Earth. We’re thrilled to be kicking off the Breaking Bread series with Tiny Rebel, and to be bringing it to beer-lovers exclusively via Co-op.’
‘We’re celebrating saving over 3.3 million slices of surplus bread since we began brewing in 2016’ he adds. ‘If we stacked up those slices, they’d reach almost 5 times the height of Mount Everest!’
A certified B Corp, Toast’s beers are mainly packaged in cans, and for good reason. Cans have a carbon footprint that’s 65 per cent lower than bottles, while beer served from kegs cuts that footprint by 80 per cent. Encouraging customers to choose cans or draught is a key part of Toast’s sustainability strategy, helping to further reduce the environmental impact of each brew.
