UK retailer Iceland has partnered with Tiny Rebel, a Welsh brewery, to make pale ale from the supermarket’s leftover bread. Tiny Rebel uses the unsold bread from Iceland’s Welsh bread supplier and their stores to make the Bread Board ale. The ale has “tropical fruit and citrus aromas with a refreshing hopped bite.”
Speaking about the new venture, Tiny Rebel said: “We’d never done anything like this before, but we were eager to go further than reducing our food waste and actually help reduce more waste than we produce ourselves. So we set about on a series of trial brews, learning what the bread would do in terms of the process of brewing and the flavour of the resultant beer.”
Tiny Rebel added some detail about the brewing process, writing: “The bread replaces some of the mal in the mashing process. The starches in the bread are broken down into fermentable sugars, just as they are in malted barley. This requires an enzyme found in malt, so the mash is not 100 per cent bread.
“The bread is not simply a flavouring – it becomes one of the building blocks of the beers, providing some of the sugars which will be fermented by the yeast to produce alcohol, carbon dioxide and some flavour compounds.”
Both brands have environmental credentials are the fronting the reason for the Bread Board ale, with Iceland being one of the supermarkets working to reduce their impact on the environment. Iceland announced plans earlier in the year to remove palm oil from all their own-brand products, with the change complete by 2019.
Iceland will be donating 10p from each bottle sold to environmental charity, Surfers Against Sewage.