Carlsberg & Brooklyn: Finding the Secret to Sustainable Beer
If we listen carefully, nature often has a way of answering our climate questions.
Take, for example, the question: “How can we brew sustainable beer?”
It turns out that nature has had the answer up its green sleeves for centuries – a West African grain called fonio.
The miracle grain explained
Fonio is something of a miracle, growing without the need for fertilisers, irrigation, pesticides, fungicides or weed killers.
Not a single chemical is required and it grows to maturity in seven to nine weeks, even if it rains only a few times annually, in the Sahel at the edge of the desert.
It is effectively a zero-input grain, which enables lower impact on the environment while supporting thousands of small-hold farmers in West Africa.
Crucially, according to Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver, “the beers taste wonderful”.
Fonio is in the millet family. There are two types - white fonio and black fonio.
Garrett explains: “It’s been cultivated in central West Africa for 5,000 years but was
largely ripped out by colonial powers. Fonio grows well in poor soils, it restores the land
and it traditionally has provided food security for the people of the region.”
He adds: “Fonio is also delicious at the dinner table, and I’m really happy to see influential grocery chains such as Whole Foods Markets carrying fonio on grocery shelves.
“It cooks up in five minutes and it’s like an even more flavorful version of couscous or quinoa.”
For true aficionados, Garrett offers this tasting note: “Beers brewed with fonio tend to evoke
white wine - Sauvignon blanc, gewurztraminer, lychee fruit and tropical aromatics.”
The ingredients for success
The (re)discovery of the power of fonio has led to a landmark collaboration between Brooklyn Brewery and breweries from seven countries, coming together to create a series of limited-edition beers that will spotlight fonio's qualities.
Brewing for Impact also includes giants Carlsberg (Denmark) and Guinness (Ireland), household names including Thornbridge (UK) – and the tiny Senegalese microbrewery Maison Kalao.
Why work together?
Garrett, who has been at Brooklyn for 30 years, explains that 25 million tons of barley are used in brewing and similarly huge amounts of corn and rice, almost all of it grown with substantial chemical inputs.
He says: “We can do better than that and make excellent beer at the same time.”
Garrett adds that sustainability has always been a focus for Brooklyn Brewery, from 1996, when the brewery opened as one of only a few buildings in NYC powered entirely by wind.
Now, though, his focus is on fonio – and the art and the heart of the process is collaboration: the familiar cliche ‘together, stronger’.
He says: “Brooklyn Brewery brews a lot of beer, but if we act alone, our impact only goes so far. “But once we involve lots of other breweries, large and small, across several continents, our
impact together could become huge.”
For Raphael Hilarion, Founder and Brewer at Maison Kalao, it is both a passion project and an absolute necessity.
He says: “For us, it’s an incredible opportunity to get to know a cereal grown in our country, Senegal, to talk about it, to tackle subjects such as the climate, the country’s social and economic issues, the history of this cereal... to be able to share these discussions over a beer and a
fonio-based dish is great.”
He adds: “Working alongside leading figures from the world of beer such as Garrett Oliver, who initiated this project, gives legitimacy to this too-often forgotten cereal.”
Breweries big and small
Breweries do not come much smaller than Maison Kalao and they do not come much bigger than Carlsberg.
But Garrett sees no boundaries in brewing – particularly when it comes to promoting sustainable brewing.
Zoran Gojkovic, Director of Brewing Science, Yeast & Fermentation at Carlsberg, agrees, saying: “We believe the best things come to the curious. Our purpose is to invigorate curiosity and champion the belief that all progress in the world starts with the spark of curiosity.
“This collaboration has allowed me to brew something new, fresh and potentially changemaking.”
It comes back to sustainability
The proof that Brewing for Impact is not a virtue-signalling project comes from Raphael, who explains how embedded sustainability has to be in Senegal.
He says: “The first challenge we set ourselves with Kalao was to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible. It is imperative for us to import materials, malts, hops, etc.
“In Senegal, the craft industry has this resourceful culture, as materials are expensive and
are regularly recycled when possible.
He adds: “We keep our capsules in order to give them back to decorating craftsmen. We reuse our labels more than 10 times, consign our bottles, transform our spent grains into flour and reuse our water to grow the herbs that will be used in our next beer.”
At the other end of the industry, sustainability policies and programmes are seen as a necessity.
Zoran says: “Carlsberg has a number of targets across all key areas of its value chain such as packaging, farming and water.
“These include using 100% recyclable, reusable or renewable packaging by 2030, procuring 100% of raw materials from regenerative agricultural practices by 2040 and reaching a net zero value chain by 2040.
“These targets and many more are rooted in the business and driven by our sustainability programme, Together Towards Zero and Beyond.”
A project with potential
So how realistic is it to expect more beers to be brewed using fonio? Is this the start of something or just a flash in a mash tun?
Garrett feels positive. “I think it’s very realistic that we’ll see more. There are already 700,000 tons of fonio grown in Africa annually.
There is no shortage of land upon which to grow it and you can’t really grow many other
crops in those areas - it’s too arid and the soils are too poor.
He adds: “In the past, fonio has been held back by the cleaning and de-hulling process, which was traditionally done by hand and required lots of strenuous physical labour.
“As modern grain processing machinery is brought into play by Yolélé West Africa, the yield will almost double and the amount of labour required will be a tiny fraction of what it was in the past.”
Farmers can now spend their time and efforts farming and building their businesses, says Garrett, “instead of engaging in subsistence-style practices”.
The rest is very straightforward: “For brewers, from craft brewers to huge international
breweries, all we have to do is buy the grain, use it and make great beers from it.
“Big international breweries don’t make any raw materials decisions lightly and they don’t tend
to move as quickly as smaller brewers.
“That’s one reason why it’s so great to have them involved here - they’re now studying fonio carefully and getting excited about what it can do.”
He concludes: “I think that you’ll soon be seeing a lot more fonio beers on the shelves and not just from us and our collaborators...and that’ll be the start of something big.”
To read the full story in the magazine click HERE
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