An Australian brewer is bringing new meaning to the phrase “waste not, want not” by converting food that otherwise have been thrown away into delicious craft beer.
Concerned by the 7.6 million tonnes of food that goes to landfill every year – creating destructive methane emissions – Canberra’s Capital Brewing Co. resolved to work with local producers to repurpose fruit into their beer-making process.
Up to 25 per cent of fruit and veg never leaves farms because it is deemed not well enough shaped for supermarket shelves, leading to an oversupply of produce, so Capital took the opportunity of the recent Great Australian Beer Spectapular (GABS) in Sydney to trial a process that it now hopes to upscale for the future.
“We started to think about how we could repurpose some of that product into our beer-making process and then thought a cool way to showcase that might be at the GABS Festival, which lends itself to being a little bit more creative with some of the things that you’re producing,” says Capital’s managing director, Laurence Kain.
To that end, the brewery created an Apple & Rhubarb Crumble Pastry Imperial Sour, using ugly apples and oversupply of rhubarb; the Leftover Pavlova Pastry Sour, using Kiwi, strawberry and mango from a local market that would have been thrown out; a Cherry Cola seltzer using an oversupply of cherries from a local orchard; and a Blackberry & Plum Stout, using an oversupply of blackberries and plums.
And rather than coming up with the ideas for the special creations first, Capital reverse-engineered the beers according to what was available or in excess abundance.
“I think that fits a little bit more with an older way of living and maybe something that’s a little bit more in tune with nature,” says Kain, “where you’re actually just consuming what’s available at that time of year rather than having produce shipped up and down the country and everything’s always in season.”
The beers required special treatment before they could be made available to the tasting public, with the brewery’s full-time science staff using a PCR lab – the same technology used to detect Covid – to test for any organisms that might spoil the beer.
“Not only can we test our final product, but we can also test the inputs so that we know that what we’re using has been effectively pasteurised and doesn’t have remaining living organisms that might have come in off the skin of the fruit, for example, that will then create unwanted flavours within,” Kain says.
While the beers created for GABS were a one-off, the positive reception has encouraged Capital to use the lessons learned for future seasonal or special releases that would be more widely available. As one of only three breweries in Australia to have B-Corp accreditation, which measures a company’s entire social and environmental impact, as well as its trailblazing work to achieve carbon neutral certification, Capital is always looking for ways to “operate in the environmentally most responsible way that we can”.
Other company initiatives include a partnership with organic farm Landtasia that allows hop and yeast waste from the brewing process to be made into compost, and another with GoTerra that allows the food-waste from their 1000-person capacity taproom to raise black soldier fly larvae, which are then sold to livestock farmers.
That is accompanied by an approach to their seasonal beers that is “appropriate for the climate and time of year and the mood”. For winter, Capital just released a dark lager, inspired by the mighty Mexican beer Negra Modelo and some of the darker Japanese lagers – “it’s a nice dark approachable beer but it’s not really thick like a stout” – and, for spring, they are planning to release a mango IPA.
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Originally published as How Capital Brewing Co. is turning food bound for landfill into craft beer with a difference