Turning bread into beer! Like in ancient Babylon!

We’ve heard that one beer is equal to two slices of bread, and it turns out to be quite true – Brussels Beer Project bottles the first beer made from bread.

For several years in Brussels, they have been using bread not sold in shops and replacing 20% of the malt with it. It adds a nice toasty flavor to the drink, but the idea goes deeper than range variety and connoisseur delight, namely to take recycling to a much higher level. Babylon Beer’s advertising slogan is “Back to the Future” because 4 millennia ago in Mesopotamia they drank beer from fermented bread. 

It is a great example of a circular economy: after making beer from bread, with the waste from the process – spent grains ground into flour, they produce… bread. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the Belgian beer giant donated unsold kegs of its beer to a chain of bakeries in Brussels that produce bread destined for food banks, Politico reports. 

Part of the spent grains goes to the production of exfoliating soap, and among the company’s innovations is the creation of another type of “zero-waste” beer from leftover packets of crushed biscuits. With this invention, the Brussels Beer Project minimizes the waste of food products, and the campaign is getting greener and bigger. 

The eyes are also directed at the London brewery Toast Ale which recycles bread into beer according to the recipe of its Belgian colleagues. This method of production saves about 10 tons of harmful carbon emissions per year. 

“This is the path we will follow – towards maximum energy efficiency. A step on this path is the creation of a second brewery that will work together with a green energy production in order to produce the necessary electricity,” says the brand’s co-founder Sebastien Morvan.