An estimated 44 percent of all bread is thrown away because people do not get around to using it in time and worry it is stale. But using so-called bread waste in the brewing process is one way breweries are helping tackle this issue, and Toast Ale is leading the charge. Rhian Owen reports. 

2009 was the year that food waste came into the spotlight in the UK. The Government acknowledged that food wastage was an international policy issue requiring urgent action worldwide, and this was underpinned by the country’s “war on waste” plans introduced by then-environment secretary Hilary Benn. Also in 2009, Tristram Stuart’s book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, describing the problem of food waste, was published. 

Stuart would later go on to launch the ethical beer brand Toast, which is brewed using surplus fresh bread. “Tristram embraces food waste as a relatively simple problem for us to solve because essentially we need to value the food that we’re producing it and eating it, instead of wasting it,” said Louisa Ziane, the co-founder of Toast. “Compared to some environmental problems, it is a simple one and a delicious problem to solve.”

While it is often dubbed one of the world’s dumbest problems, food waste despite some good intentions, is still at crisis levels. 2009 was an important year in exposing the issues of food waste, but according to Wrap – an organisation that works with the food and drink industry to create economic and environmental value from reducing food waste – the estimated total UK post farm-gate food and drink waste is around 10 million tonnes per year, 70 percent of which the organisation states could have been avoided. The value is £20bn a year.

However, Ziane explained that there is a growing awareness of food waste at a public and industry level, and astute entrepreneurs are ceasing the day. There has been a raft of new product developments launched on the back of the UK’s food waste problem. “There has definitely been this shift of small disruptive businesses using byproducts of industries that would have otherwise been wasted that are perfectly edible, used to create new products and even upcycled, so creating products that are of a higher value than those which would have been wasted,” says Ziane.

This is what Toast has been doing, and Ziane says for the brewing industry the opportunities in this arena are vast. There are great opportunities environmentally, but also socially.

“I think the brewing industry is naturally a more environmentally conscious industry than others,” says Ziane. “We’re close to the land, the ingredients used to make beer are natural – barley, hops, water, yeast – so brewers tend to be more in touch with the environment and the quality of those ingredients. I think the growing movement of craft beer drinkers, and the more environmentally conscious consumer, has come together at the same time really well. So we’re seeing other craft beer brands doing things – both environmentally but also socially.”

She added: “We’ve just done a collab with Tap Social Movement and they work with ex-offenders to rehabilitate them by giving them not just brewery roles but back office roles and marketing roles as well. I think we’re seeing that across the whole food industry and breweries in particular.

“The bigger brewery companies are taking initiatives, such as environmental packaging, so we’re seeing bigger breweries buying the smaller breweries, and as they acquire these small breweries they’re also acquiring their passion for environmental consciousness and social consciousness.”

Beer From Bread

Bread waste is a battle the brewery industry can take on. A study by Wrap estimated 44 percent of all bread is thrown away because people do not get around to using it in time and worry it is stale.

“Bread is a huge problem,” says Ziane. “We work with the sandwich industry. The sandwiches that you’re buying in retail settings, the crust end of every loaf isn’t used, so that’s two slices of every loaf. Also, often the first slice is also not used as it’s slightly smaller and sandwiches need to be a uniformed square shape, and so that could be four slices of every bread loaf that’s being discarded. We are able to use that bread to make really delicious beer.” 

Ziane explains the the timely idea behind creating Toast: “We were inspired by a brewery in Belgium called The Brussels Beer Project; they’ve got a range of great tasting beers and to make one of those they paired with a local bakery. They took their surplus bread, and turned it into an amber called Babylone.

“Tristram was visiting the brewery back in 2015 and tried the beer, found it really delicious, and talked to the guys at the brewery. They were really open with us, and shared the recipe, and worked with us to help develop something for the UK market.”

While Stuart returned to the UK with this great idea for the UK market, Ziane says they still had to find a brewer willing to give this a go. And a baker.

“I had to find a brewer that would be willing to try this out with us, because brewing with bread comes with a lot of complexities; brewers are concerned about a stuck mash ton as the concentration of the bread at the bottom of the ton can prevent the beer from moving through the container,” she explains. “Then I phoned a lot of bakeries around Hackney to line up their surplus bread at the end of the day, and get that to a central point where we could prepare it.”

Ziane says: “There was a team of about five of us, slicing the bread, drying it out, ready to brew it the next day. It was an intense operation, but we’ve learned a lot since then. Now we’ve adapted the recipe so the bread doesn’t have to be dried, which is great from a resource perspective but also from an energy perspective.

“We’re able to work with one single sandwich factory – we just take some of the surplus from a day’s production. The factory deliver the bread to the brewery, they donate it as well, otherwise it would be a waste management cost for them.”

Toast are contract brewing; their first batch was with Hackney Brewery in 2015 and their first brew was tested on Jamie & Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast. It was well received and since then Toast has continued to grow.

“We’ve since moved breweries, we now work with World Top, a brewery in Yorkshire near Driffield. It’s one of the most sustainable breweries in the UK; they use barley that is grown on the field adjacent to them, and they send their spent grain back to be used as animal feed or for composting, so it’s a really nice circular story,” says Ziane. “The bread forms one third of the malt bill, so we’re also reducing the demands for barley, which in itself has an environmental impact as it requires land, water and energy to grow.”

Looking to Collaborate

Toast has grown to have a range of four beers; a Pale Ale, Craft Lager, Session IPA and American Pale Ale. They’re not currently planning to launch any further beers into their range. However, Toast have done around 35 collaborations with breweries all over the world, and this is something they’re going to continue with. “It’s a nice way of working with a local brewer and a local bakery to create a one off beer, something that is really unique,” says Ziane.

For Toast, collaboration is crucial. Ziane says it’s pretty much the point of what they are doing. Toast want to lead the way in helping breweries cut down on food waste, and they know they won’t make an impact on their own.

“We’ve open sourced our recipe so that homebrewers can do this at home, they can use up part of the loaf they aren’t going to get through. We also work with brewers directly, sharing our skills. Our master brewer will go to the brewery and work with the head brewer there to devise a recipe and also to teach them some of the tricks of the trade around brewing with bread, We’ve had breweries from all over the world ask questions, looking for support for what they’re doing.”

Ziane says that in one single Toast bottle there’s about one slice of bread. Toast recently celebrated upcycling one million slices of bread earlier in 2019, and stacked up that amounts to one and a half times the height of Mount Everest. 

But Ziane says they’ve got more goals to reach, and the team are currently relooking at the recipe. “ At the moment 33 percent of our beer is from bread, because we require the enzymes that are naturally present in the barley to break down the carbohydrates into simple sugars that the yeast then breaks up and turn into alcohol.

“But if we can add enzymes from other sources then we can put more bread into the beer. So we’re experimenting to increase the amount of bread that we use in our beer, our recipe could change.”