Belgian Brewery Tries Making Beer From Unsold Bread

Concerns about the huge amount of food wasted in Europe (and elsewhere) led a brewer in Brussels to launch a project to make beer with unsold bread that would otherwise be tossed in the trash bins. According to Sebastien Morvan, about 12 percent of food waste in Belgium comprises unsold bread discarded by supermarkets. His Brussels Beer Project hopes to revive the ancient practice of brewing beer from bread. The oldest known beer recipe (4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia) mixed multigrain bread loaves with honey. Morvan says he can replace 30 percent of the barley used to make beer with one and a half slices of bread per bottle. About 1,100 pounds of discarded bread makes1,057 gallons of beer.