Good News: This beer may save the world. Bad News: It’s made out of beans!
THE good news is that drinking beer could help save the planet... but the bad news is that it has to be made from broad beans.
Scientists have proved that brewing the nation’s favourite booze out of one of its least popular vegetables helps make it greener.
Researchers replaced 46 per cent of the barley in a pale ale with the legume and then traced the drink’s environmental impact from bean row to beermat. The switch in ingredients shrank the beer’s carbon footprint by a sixth.
Andrew Barnett, owner of Barney’s brewery in Edinburgh, which produced a trial run of the brew, said: ‘The feedback we’ve had is that the beans give it a nutty sort of note. But
‘Tastes good and is more environmentally friendly’
it’s fairly subtle and not radically different from what you would expect from any other pale ale.
‘The broad bean is quite a humble crop. If we can help it be used more widely in a whole host of ways, maybe some people who are suspicious of it will learn to love it.’
Mr Barnett added: ‘Our plan was to show that it could be done: brew a beer that tastes good while helping to make the process more environmentally friendly.’
Barney’s Cool Beans brew was produced in conjunction with Dundee’s James Hutton Institute and Abertay University.
Now a team of scientists – led by academics from Trinity College Dublin and assisted by Arbikie Distillery near Montrose, Forfarshire – have worked out its environmental credentials. Beans replaced nearly half the grain to provide the basic starch needed for the process of brewing.
Legumes need less fertiliser to grow and also help improve soil quality. The discarded pods were used as sheep and cattle feed, instead of the usual imported soy beans.
The gluten-free bean beer outperformed the traditional barley version on seven out of 16 environmental measures, including energy use and damage to fresh and marine waters. Published in the journal Sustainable Production & Consumption, the study states: ‘Brewers should consider the use of legumes in their brewing recipes to lower their environmental footprint, increasing the availability of more nutritious beer co-products as a local source of animal feed, and diversifying cropping systems while adding novelty to their product range.’
Cool Beans was described by one reviewer as having a ‘dark amber colour and biscuity flavour with a bitter and dry palate-smacking edge’.