The best we can

'Toast to you' is our contribution to reducing food-waste, and our personal project of making the most ecological beer possible.
25% of the mash consists of day-old ecological rye-bread from Järna Bageri and every time we brew this beer we try to scale this up.

How we do it.

Beer is made by fermenting sugars extracted from malted grain. Grain contains long sugar chains and the husk from the grain contains an enzyme capable of breaking down these long sugar chains into smaller sugar chains.

By letting the grain soak in water with the right climate for the enzymes, the enzymes start to break down the sugars. When enough sugars have been broken down you wash out the sugars, this is called sparging.

During sparging the husk from the grain forms a natural filter-bed. Rye-bread doesn't have much husk left and it can easily clog up the filter-bed. This is the same problem you run into if you use a lot of wheat in the mash (wheat also lacks the husk) and a common solution for this problem is to use additional rice-husk.

In our first attempts we found out we could use about 25% of bread in the mash, however, sparging took forever and at some point we had to 'cut the mash', meaning we had to slice the filterbed a few times. It became clear we could use some husk as well, but using husk from rice would take away from the idea of making 'the most ecological beer possible'.

Luckily we met Thomas from Warbro Kvarn, who is extending their business and is in the middle of starting a malt-house, which we are really looking forward to. Thomas told me we could have as much left-over husk from their ecological grains as we could carry. Now, with added ecological husk from Warbro Kvarn in the mash, we use up to 25% of bread without any filtering problems, and we will raise this percentage every time we brew to find the absolute limit.

Funny detail; Warbro Kvarn also delivers the rye to Järna Bageri for their rye-bread, so we are making the circle complete.

In addition we lightly toast all the rye-bread first, when toasted the bread is less 'sticky', and it falls apart more easily.