This week on Beer Sessions Radio™, host Jimmy Carbone is convening a special Wednesday live show with TED Talk celebrity and food sustainability pioneer Tristram Stuart. Tristram is founder of Feedback (focused on food waste) and Toast Ale, which is making craft beer from bread that otherwise would be wasted. He learned about this brewing innovation via the Brussels Beer Project, when he tasted their Babylon beer made from bread waste. One-hundred percent of the profits of Toast Ale go to increase the recycling of bread waste. He’s creating a classic English ale that is being well received by beer experts as a quality craft ale that also solves the problem of food waste around the world and its delicious solutions.
Tristram’s lifelong mission to bring food waste to the fore (nearly 1/3 of all food on Earth is wasted); it’s a massive environmental problem that people are finally starting to address. As he says, “Let’s have a party, guys… it’s a delicious solution to a serious problem: eating and enjoying food together rather than throwing it away.”
How do you make beer from leftover bread? The basic principle is simple: You replace a percentage of barley in brewing with bread.
Since launching in the UK in January, Toast has rescued more than a ton of bread that would have otherwise gone into landfills. Bread is one of the biggest contributors to food waste; so much is produced that even soup kitchens and feeding programs consistently have more bread than they can distribute. NYC plans to launch its own version of the product in 2017 to be spearheaded by Madi Holtzman and Devin Hardy. Toast’s launch in NYC is just the first step in what will soon become a global, united movement to eliminate bread waste and raise money for charity by brewing quality beer.
Also in the studio are Amy Halloran, author of The New Bread Basket, Pat Green of Chelsea Craft Brewing Company and Rachel Eshner of Eschner Farms.
Amy notes that historically, bread wasn’t wasted because there were recipes that used up all the bread. Today there is a lot of wasted labor and energy in the bread market. Tristram tries to prevent the waste in the first place, with Toast Ale being a secondary solution.
Pat is working with Madi and the Toast NYC team to be the initial brewer of the beer up at his new facility up in the Bronx. He explains the process of adding bread to the mash to create the new beer. There are brewers all over the world working to come up with new recipes and craft beer brewers are very excited about the effort.
Amy talks about how “grains are this unifying human experience. Grains brought us together oh so long ago and they have this great capacity to bring us together again.”
Listen to the full episode here.