Rather than just buy any old beer, choose companies that are making a real difference. Most canned beers these days are vegan (draughts not always, so check before ordering). Fauna Brewing makes beers that help endangered species. Also read of no-and-low alcohol craft beers.
Never buy beers packed in plastic rings, they are choking hazards to wildlife (often invisible in water and wrap around beaks/necks of wildfowl). E6PR and Biopak both sell biodegradable beer can holders.
Brewgooder makes lager, session IPA, tropical pale ale, New England IPA and citrus beer. The founder caught a parasite from dirty water while travelling in Nepal and since then, the company uses profits to build clean water projects worldwide. It launched with 1000 crowdfunding and in 3 months, it had created the first project in Malawi, providing clean water to a rural village of over 5000 people.
Tap Social Beer (Oxford) is a social enterprise craft brewery, which makes beer to create jobs for people getting ready to leave prison. 70% of re-offending is due to not being able to find a job on release. To date, the company has created over 75,000 hours of paid employment for prisoners on day release (or prison leavers). Most prisoners get around £76 for their journey home (often a tent), and half of prison leavers reoffend within a year, costing taxpayers around £6 billion each year.
vegan artisan beers (made from bread waste)
Almost half the bread sold in England gets thrown away, so using it to make beer, seems like a mighty find idea! This also reduces costs to brewers (so the savings are passed onto you) and reduces climate emissions (less energy needed to harvest and transport malt).
Toast Brewing replaces 25% of brewing yeast with surplus sandwich loaves and ‘heel ends’ from bakeries. So far saving 3 million slices of bread from going to landfill, other malt is bought from regenerative farmers, with spent grains collected by local farmers.
Don’t give leftover crusty/stale/salted/buttered bread to garden birds or wildfowl, as it can choke, harm or smear on feathers (affecting waterproofing/insulation). A little fresh soaked wholemeal bread may be okay. But if everyone does this in a country of 60 million people, birds end up eating our food, rather than their natural diet. Leaving bread out also attracts unwelcome garden visitors, like rats.
The company also gives 100% of profits (after costs and staff salaries) to good causes, mostly to Feedback, a food waste charity founded by Tristram Stuart, who says the world throws away enough food to feed the world’s hungry people three times over. Volunteers for its Gleaning Network turn surplus farm produce into free meals, and once even cooked a dinner to ‘feed the 5000’. Jesus would be proud! Tristram is Toast Brewing’s ‘Golden Shareholder’, to ensure it never ‘sells out’. It’s also working with another social enterprise to serve coffee by day in a taproom and beer by night, preventing food waste and homelessness.
The beers are available in four flavours. Although beers use bread without seeds, nuts, fruits or vegetables (to avoid flavour contamination), upcycled ingredients means there are no allergy guarantees. The company also does not use oily bread – so no focaccia beer!) Choose from:
- Grassroots Pale Ale (peaches, passionfruit & pineapple)
- Rise Up Lager (an English Helles-style beer)
- New Dawn Session IPA (punchy citrus & floral notes)
- Changing Tides (0.5% low-alcohol citrus-spice lager)
Crumbs Brewing (Surrey) was founded by a small bakery. The owners used to run a pub, so it was obvious what to do with the bread waste! The all-vegan range includes:
- Sourdough Pale Ale
- Bloomin’ Amber Lager
- Rye Ruby Ale
- Naan Laager!
