Upstream - Documentary #6: Beer - Crafting a Better Economy

Episode Date: May 9, 2017

Once an important life-force of early civilization and an ancient crafter of community, beer was, like many things under our current economic system, disfigured and twisted by the forces of the market and the drive for profit. In this episode, we take a close look at this story, starting in ancient Mesopotamia and tracing the history of beer up through the giant consolidations of the 20th century to the birth of the craft beer revolution in the 1970s and 80s. Brew expert and award-winning author Randy Mosher guides us through this history, telling great stories and exploring ancient beer mythology along the way. But the story doesn't end there -- the beer revolution is really just beginning. Craft beer has begun to bring back many of the most important values and characteristics of beer that were lost for so long, going far beyond just taste. How is the new economy embodied in a pint of beer? This is an important theme that Rob Hopkins, the co-founder of the Transition Town movement and founder of New Lion Brewery, explores throughout the episode. How is craft beer beginning to stitch back together the economies of towns and cities that have been torn apart by globalization and an obsession with growth? How can beer demonstrate the concept of the circular economy? These are important questions explored in depth through Rob’s expertise. There are many other incredible stories of brewers and breweries that are radically changing the landscape of the beer industry. Throughout the episode you’ll meet a wide variety of folks, from a brewery in London that makes beer out of surplus bread, to the first cooperatively owned brewery in California. After listening to this episode, you may never look at a bottle of beer in the same way. Disclaimer: listening to this episode may cause you to crave a dark, chocolatey stout. Or a piney, hoppy IPA. Or a nutty brown ale. Or a fruity saison. Or a tangy farmhouse ale. Or...well you get the point: you may want to listen to this episode over a pint. Featuring ​Rob Hopkins - Founder of New Lion Brewery, Co-Initator of the Transition Town Movement Randy Mosher - Author of Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink Bart Watson - Chief Economist, Brewers Association Tom Stainer - Head of Communications, CAMRA Julie Prebble - Business Development Manager, Toast Ale Vanesa de Blas - Brewer, Temple Brew House Andrew Gilhespy - Grower at The Almond Thief Emy Mendoza - Umunhum Brewing Music by: ​Maude Gun Lanterns  Antwon Pele ​ Many thanks to Bethan Mure for the background/cover art.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A radio documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Join us as we journey upstream.

To the heart of our economic system. And discover cutting-edge stories. Of game-changing solutions. Based on connection. Resil resilience, and prosperity for all. Right now I'm standing outside of the New Lion Brewery here in Totnes, a small town in Devon County in the United Kingdom. This is the birthplace of the Transition Town Movement, a grassroots initiative that has spread all over the world. Its aim is to increase community self-sufficiency by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and mitigating the effects of climate change and economic instability. We could spend the entire episode talking about the transition town movement,

but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about beer. In this episode of Upstream, we will tell the story of this bubbly beverage that has been with us since the dawn of civilization. We'll explore its history from the earliest days all the way up to the modern craft beer explosion. Along the way, we'll meet some of the folks on the cutting edge of the brewing world, from a brewery in London that makes beer out of bread, to the first cooperatively owned brewery in California.

But first, let's go in and grab a pint at New Lion. Hello! Hello, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you? Very good, thank you. What do you have on tap today? We have our core range of Pandit American Pale Ale, Session Bitteritter Main Event, and our Totnes Style 4.4 Old Mill Style. In addition, we've got our take on...

The New Lion Brewery was founded by Rob Hopkins, who was also one of the original founding members of the Transition Town movement, which began in Totnes. We met up with him at the Transition Town Totnes headquarters in the centre of town just up the road from New Lyon. Welcome Rob, why don't we start by telling us how you introduce your talks for Transition Town. I like giving a tale of two beers and I either show or sometimes I bring along as props a bottle of Budweiser or some repellent beer of that genre and some really nice bit of craft beer maybe something from the New Lion or something from somewhere else and I talk about how the two different beers kind of embody a completely different approach to how you make an economy happen and I sometimes use a picture of a of a beer from the colonel brewery in london who are really great craft brewery in london because they were on in business

on radio four and the guy who was the interviewer was a program all about craft beer and the interviewer said to them so what's your strategy for growth and he said uh growth uh we don't really have a strategy for growth he said we we're quite happy the size we are if we grew't really have a strategy for growth. He said, we're quite happy the size we are. If we grew, we'd have to work harder and stuff like that. And we know all our customers, they're all of our friends anyway. And actually, we don't want to become the biggest brewer in London. We want there to be an ecosystem of people all across the city brewing fantastic beers, and we're just one part of that. And I love that idea you know when

you look at most of the beers that people are familiar with that you find in the supermarket or in most shops are actually made by about five different companies it's this illusion of choice whereas actually there's not really much choice there at all and the explosion of craft beer has really for me is about modeling a different economy an economy which isn't about becoming the biggest it isn't about a kind of a huge race to to dominate a market it's about building an ecosystem of people who compete to make the best beer not to make the most money and so the thing i i love coming back to is the idea that maybe we can create a new economy and maybe actually we are already creating around the world a new economy that people are moving to not because of political campaigning because of

lobbying and so on they're moving because it tastes better because it's it's more nourishing it's more delicious in the same way that once you've drunk really good craft beer you would never go back and drink budweiser or Becks or any of those horrible things ever again. In the same way, that shift to a new economy becomes one that we make because every step feels like we're becoming more connected, moving towards something more delicious. And once you've gone there, you would never want to go back to the old model. So can you talk a little bit about New Lion Brewery and what the inspiration was in creating that and your experience with it?

Well, I've been involved with Transition Tower Totnes from the beginning and with a lot of the re-economy type economic regeneration stuff here. And about five years ago, I remember it struck me as really weird that a town like Totnes didn't have a brewery. You know, most towns of this size would have a brewery, at least historically, and many of them, many of them currently. And I went to Lewis in Sussex, which was one of the first transition towns for the launch of the Lewis Pound, I think it was, and they had just done a community share option to put a solar PV system on the roof of Harvey's, which is their big local brewery. They've been there for hundreds of years.

And Harvey's made, brewed a special beer called Sunshine Ale to celebrate this. I thought, that's really interesting. The idea that you'd have a brewery that would kind of tell the story of the wider transition in the beers that it brewed. And so I kind of just sort of came away with that idea and then there used to be an old brewery there was a brewery called the Lion Brewery that ran in Totnes till 1921 and the building is still on South Street and so it runs from the building that's now Seasalt all the way through South Street. And that was the Lion Brewery. So we presented the idea for the new Lion Brewery at the first Local Entrepreneur Forum,

whenever that was, 2012, I think. And it got a really positive reception. People thought it was a great idea. The Local Entrepreneur Forum is a Totnes tradition. Each year, four to five entrepreneurs pitch their big idea to a supportive crowd who in turn offer various forms of help to get the project off the ground. Types of help include financial capital, but also things like babysitting, meals, or business coaching. And then we found an investor, which made it possible. And then we hired Matt Henney, who's the head brewer and then we kind of kicked off really and our idea has always been to kind of be one of the threads that starts to

stitch the new economy together so we see a big part of our role as being to support different emerging enterprises so we go to the local entrepreneur forum every year as a kind of alumni from the first year and we go and we every year we choose one of the five people who pitch and then we support them over the next year and we make a collaborative beer with them and we help them out in different ways and we employ three people and we have a membership of about three or four hundred people who are our members who who support what we do a lot of our model is about that kind of community supported agriculture sort of thing of direct sales so a lot of it is about getting people to come into the brewery and feel part of the whole thing

and we like to tell stories from the town's history and the town's past and present and future in terms of the labels of the beers that we make. So it seems that there are craft beer companies that can be still pretty old economy or pretty traditional economics. And then there's craft beer that can be new economics and kind of even a spectrum, like there's cooperatively owned, there's consumer owned, there's organic and locally sourced. So there's a lot of different things. And I know that you recently drafted an informal craft beer manifesto, which had localism, creativity, and a rejection of growth as some of the themes that underpin. So can you talk a little bit about, like, do you see it as a spectrum?

Like, you can be craft beer, but still be kind of in the old economy. And then is that how you see it? I'm just trying to visualize it myself. Yeah, I think there is very much a broad spectrum. And there are some people who are craft brewers who are very, very commercial and who don't have a bigger kind of radical, I guess they have a kind of radical sense in terms of they want to really pioneer

really interesting flavors and tastes and that kind of thing. But they don't necessarily have that social sort of radical political side underneath it. But there are lots that do. And then there are some who are very, very sort of rooted in place, rooted in community and work in that kind of a way and there are quite a few who maybe see themselves more

grounded in kind of culture and arts and music and people like um beaver town who everything they make is like a most beautiful sort of artifact, these gorgeous design work and really interesting flavours and tastes. But I don't think they necessarily have that kind of underlying sort of radical side to what they do, but there are quite a lot that do. So it is a real spectrum. And then also, of course, you get stuff which is called craft beer, but which is actually made by big commercial brewers who are trying to bring some of that flavours in.

And in America, there are some very, some of the early craft brewers now are very very big commercial operations they're still independent but they're very big i guess what we were trying to do with that manifesto was to was to try and find something that was a kind of a like a flag that that some of the craft brewers who see themselves as having a bigger sort of social purpose might kind of gravitate around or feel was like a banner that they could stand under. Beer has a deep, rich, full-bodied taste. I mean, history. It's played a major role in shaping the human species. This story is told in the book Tasting Beer, authored by Randy Mosher.

Robert called Randy in his home in Chicago to talk a bit about beer, one of his favorite subjects. So you begin your book, Tasting Beer, by going into a little bit of history. Maybe if you could just talk a little bit about how old beer is actually, and that it actually predates civilization? It does. Well, it kind of comes right along with civilization and was, we believe, one of the main causes of civilization. So there's this place in eastern Turkey and Kurdistan region called Göbekli Tepe. And it's an excavated site from about 15,000 B.C.

So they're pretty certain they have chemical evidence that they were both making wine and brewing beer on that site. And at that point in time, it would have been wild grass, wild forms of barley or wheat that they were using to brew beer. And this was a temple complex. It wasn't really in a city. So this would have been a place that beer would have been brewed ceremonially and probably used to some extent as bait to draw people in from all over the region. So it's really cool to see how in those early days,

beer provided kind of a glue that people would come from all over the region to have these big feasts and drink alcohol and exchange daughters from different villages and, you know, all the kinds of things that exchange goods. And so it really was the thing that brought a bunch of kind of herders and gatherers and people who are maybe just thinking about, maybe not even thinking about agriculture, but it certainly was one of the things that led them to that. So it was pretty cool to see how that came about and to see that beer and other forms of alcohol

was a real way that started people getting together in larger groups and across a larger region rather than just living in little bands and not having a ton of contact with each other. larger groups, and across a larger region, rather than just living in little bands and not having a ton of contact with each other. And it seems to have sort of sprouted out around the same time in many, many different regions. Well, that's the earliest site. It does appear that beer began in Mesopotamia, now what we would think of as the Sumerian

culture in Iraq, and also in Egypt about the same time, beer seems to be about as early as those cultures were. There seems to be some evidence of beer. There's also some evidence in China from about that same time period, or maybe even a little bit earlier, around 10,000 BC. In tasting beer, there's a lot of cool stories, and one of them which I thought was really interesting was the story of, and I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this right,

but Sekhmet from ancient Egyptian mythology. Maybe you could tell the story of that. Yeah, so this is a story. This story is about how beer saved humanity from extinction. And those stories always kind of serve as a metaphor for the importance of beer. And, you know, if it weren't for beer, we kind of wouldn't be here. So the story goes that Sekhmet, she's the one form of a goddess that's the daughter of Ra. Ra was the big main god of ancient Egypt, the boss god.

And Ra thought, she was a, she represented the flooding of the Nile and menstrual cycles, and she was a goddess of war, and so one of those creator-destroyer types of goddesses. And she's represented in statues as a young, beautiful, young, shapely woman with a lion's head on her. And so the story goes that Ra thought that humanity was kind of backsliding and not worshiping him properly, and so he got instructed Sekhmet to go out there and knock a few heads together. And so she started carrying on some violence, and eventually she got a taste for blood and is, like, drinking blood and eating people

and really causing a lot of trouble. And eventually the fields are red with blood and the rivers are running red with blood, and everybody's like, hey, Sekhmet, that's about good. You can stop now. And Sekhmet's just on a tear at this point. She's out of control. So people had the idea that they would give her some beer. And because she's a goddess, they gave her 50,000 jars of beer, and they made it red beer because the logic was she was drinking blood. If we give her red beer,

maybe she'll think it's blood and she'll drink blood. If we give her red beer, maybe she'll think it's blood and she'll drink it. And not wanting to take any chances, they spiked it with mandrake root, which is a very powerful sedative, one of those old-timey witchy kind of herbs that pops up later in medieval Europe. And so Sekhmet goes to sleep and humanity is saved. And that's the end of the story. So it's, you know, like I said, one of those metaphors for trying to explain how important this stuff is for us. We asked Randy about the early history of beer in the United States. Well, there wasn't much, to be honest.

It really wasn't until the late 1840s when the Germans started coming over, and they brought beer with them. Because beer, for the Germans, beer was really an absolutely essential part of their social life and communal life, and they set up breweries and they set up beer gardens. And the idea was you work six days a week. On Sunday, you bring the family. You spend all day. You drink a bunch of lager beer, which was very light in alcohol, probably somewhere on the order of 3.5% back in those days. And so they could drink a lot of beer and have a nice day and not get really hammered.

have a nice day and not get really hammered. And so really everything we know about what our beer culture today is really derives from that German lager culture. And of course, that eventually morphed from a very dark, sweet, heavy German Munchner, Kohlbacher, Erlanger styles, and became lighter, drier, crisper, and served colder, as exemplified by Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz, and especially by Budweiser from Anheuser-Busch. But that took a little later, but by about 1900, those beers, similar to what they are today, but not identical. But basically, the basic character of those beers was pretty well set. And then a couple decades after that, Prohibition happened.

So what kind of effects on brewing and beer consumption did that have? Well, a lot of breweries went out of business. I think there were about 1,200 breweries closed to prohibition. I think immediately after prohibition, another couple hundred, about 200 opened up again. And then within a few years of that, another 200 or 300 had opened up. But you had gone from a high of something like 6,000 breweries in the 1870s way down to 1,200. So there was a lot of consolidation business-wise.

Prohibition marked the early stages of a dark period for beer in the U.S., one which lasted up until not so long ago. Many smaller breweries that were put out of business during Prohibition never came back, and those that hung on struggled to compete with giants like Miller and Budweiser, who came to dominate the market. As the larger breweries get larger, they have economies of scale that help them produce beer at a relatively affordable price.

And they also have resources that they can decide to take a lower margin to force more vulnerable companies out of the business. And so you had people really trying to find ways to make beer cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. people really trying to find ways to make beer cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Just finding ways to make beer with as little beer ingredients as possible and using a lot of sugar and not a lot of hops. And, you know, between that and the price competition driving out competitors, you really had a situation by the late 1970s where you had, a situation by the late 1970s where you had, I think the number is about 70 or 80 breweries operating in this country. So it really was pretty pitiful. That's when I started drinking, you know, and there just really wasn't much around. And it was a kind of a thirst for variety,

a thirst for some kind of character, some story, some connection to history, you know, something with meaning that started to become important for people. Like many things, beer was sucked dry by the vampire-like system of global industrial capitalism, so that by the early 1970s it was hollowed out, a shell of what it had been for the last several thousand years of human society. Interestingly, a similar thing was happening in the UK. There was an amalgamation of the industry going on. There was consolidation and, as often happens in many industries, the operators who were being very successful and getting bigger

have the resources to buy up the smaller operators. This is Tom Stainer from CAMRA, which stands for the Campaign for Real Ale, an organization in the UK that has played an important role in campaigning for smaller local breweries. By the sort of early 70s, the landscape was looking quite alarming. You know, over the previous decades to that, people who were taking notes of these sort of things and noticed that numbers of breweries were dropping. And when there once had been, you know, hundreds, if not thousands across the country, we were sort of ending up with what's called the big six, these six big national brewers, who through their sheer influence and

power were able to convince pubs to start their brand and cut a lot of other small operators out of the market. Although it never got quite so bad as it was in the US, things in the UK were definitely heading in the same direction. We asked Tom to describe Camera's roots and the role it played in helping to stop the consolidation of breweries in the UK. It was set up in the early 1970s by four chaps who went on holiday to Ireland already concerned about the lack of choice of good quality beer in the UK and when they got to Ireland they realised the landscape there was sort of showing them what the future could hold because there are very few beers on offer in the bars the Irish pub scene was dominated by just a

few big brands and it really gave them a wake-up call to what could happen in in British pubs across the country and they came back sort of energized and and with this idea they set up a campaign for real ale and they were young and they didn't really think it would take off and and to their great surprise it did take off and when you fast forward four or so decades we're looking at an organization that has almost 185,000 members across the UK with independent voice of real ale drinkers beer drinkers pub users we're a consumer organization. We campaign to support the people who produce good beer and real ale, and we campaign to support people who

are running the pubs that serve that beer. Although Camera played an important role in supporting smaller breweries in the UK, it didn't really lead to the same kind of movement that was taking place in the U.S. during the same time. Hello, this is Bart. Hey, Bart, this is Robert. How are you doing, Robert? We called up Bart Watson, the chief economist at the Brewers Association, an organization that protects and promotes small and independent brewers, to get his take on why the movement in the U.S. was different. independent brewers to get his take on why the movement in the U.S. was different.

You know, at the federal level, you know, small brewers do receive a credit. So they pay a lower federal excise tax than large brewers. This has been the case since the late 1970s, which is around the point where we saw this turn around. So certainly I think it's one of the contributing factors to helping small breweries get restarted in the country. Do you know what causeded in the country. Do you know what caused that in the 70s? Well, the story, which may be a proper fall, is that Jimmy Carter passed it because of Billy Beer,

which his brother Billy Carter was supposedly fond of, but he was pastoring the Carter administration. And I think the idea was to, you know, breweries have been going out of business pretty solidly for a hundred years at that point. Um, so we had over 4,000 breweries in the country in the late 1800s and saw pretty much a steady decline, um, you know, obviously accelerated by prohibition, um, but from the 1870s to the 1970s. And, um, at that point, there really weren't that many small breweries left. And so I don't really think the policymakers thought it would have such an effect. Boy, were they wrong. It had a very important effect on the beer industry. The legislation that Jimmy Carter signed into law in 1978

didn't just provide a tax break for smaller breweries. It also had an amendment in it which re-legalized homebrewing, something that had been illegal since prohibition. So a change in legislation played an important role in the rise of small breweries in the U.S. But it wasn't just legislation. There was also a countercultural shift occurring in the United States around the same time as well. Here's Randy Mosher again. There's also a thing called the Whole Earth Catalog that was a big phone book size book that came out right about 1970. 1970, so right kind of at that real peak of the counterculture movement in the United States of what the boomer generation, my generation, was really very tuned into. And that book got everybody thinking about thinking smaller and being more independent and about making your own

soap and brewing your own beer and living off the grid. And so a lot of these ideas that really have shaped the culture very much since then were kind of given a point and an emphasis by that whole earth catalog. And that was 1970 when that came out. And I think that that really was the time when people really started thinking about doing something different. So by the 70s, all of the ingredients were in place, legislation that weakened the stranglehold of the giant breweries and a fermentation at the grassroots level that began to shape a new movement in beer. You know, it's a hard thing to start an industry or to restart an industry, right? You had a whole bunch of people who had

no idea what they were doing. So there's a lot of learning there. It's a lot of bad beer. There's still some bad beer out there because beer is hard to make. Well, but there were no people making equipment. So people had to get old dairy equipment. It's one of the reasons Wisconsin was probably a little ahead of the craft beer curve compared to a lot of other states is because during that, like the early and mid-1980s, a lot of small family dairies were closing. So there was an enormous amount of sanitary stainless steel equipment up on the market for pennies on the dollar. And so that was, you know, a way a lot of people got started. Although this transition began in the 1970s,

it takes time to grow an industry. It has only been in the last few years that the small-scale craft beer revolution has really taken off. And it took even longer in the UK, because their catalyzing progressive legislation didn't come until 2002. Here's Rob again. I went to the US five years ago, and craft beer was really just starting here, maybe five or six years ago. Here's Rob again. from and you and all the beer was served in these little third of a pint glasses and you just kind of got a load of tickets and and you just went and bought these different they're incredible flavors and tastes and variety and all these small independent and really there was a sense that something really quite extraordinary was happening there and i know here it was really helped a lot by a change in the tax legislation that Gordon Brown brought in when he was prime

minister that said if you were a brewery below a certain size then you paid less tax than you would if you were a large brewery which really was a quite enlightened piece of legislation that enabled this to happen and now there's 200 new breweries a year opening in this country and the arrival of craft beer in the last five or six years has really has led to an incredible flowering, not just of breweries, I suppose, but also of techniques and really fascinating stuff people are doing with yeasts and different ingredients and using fruits and coffees and herbs and all kinds of stuff. And it's become a really fascinating, innovative culture, I think. And what's really interesting as well for me is that it's actually led to a fall in the amount of beer that's being drunk nationally, but the craft beer sector is increasing,

which suggests to me that actually what we're seeing is in this country where there is often a culture of sort of demolition drinking you know people go out and drink 12 pints of of sort of fizzy grob for the for the for the night until they fall over you know there is a cultural sort of shift now towards people actually drinking for flavor for taste and drinking less overall but drinking much better. Thank you. Ready? Here is a sample of our new batch of toast for you to try. Wonderful, and it was just put on tap yesterday? Put on tap this morning.

Fresh customers to try actually. So do the quality control. It's good. Oh, wonderful. Mmm, that's really nice. Thank you. Although a huge part of the craft beer explosion is about palate-pleasing flavors, it's not just about taste. We visited the Temple Brewhouse, located in the heart

of the historic Temple District in London. This is where Toast Ale had brewed their most recent batch of beer. We met up with one of Toast's brewers, Vanessa, who you just heard from, and their business development manager, Julie, who you'll hear from in a moment. They were kind enough to answer some of our questions over a pint of their latest batch. So what makes toast toast if it's brewed in different places? Is there a recipe or is it a style? Yes there's definitely a recipe and Vanessa was given the recipe although adapted it with using her yeast and what hops that

she had that would provide a similar profile of flavour and aroma. What makes Toast Toast is that it's great beer brewed using surplus bread. We don't brew with bread that has a home to go to or a mouth to go to, but if the bread is not going to be eaten, then we think it should be drunk. And the beer is a great way of telling the story of of actually not wasting food we shouldn't be doing it when people are hungry and where does the bread come from generally one supplier that you must have got so for vanessa's brew um or brews we've brewed twice it came from two different locations a sandwich maker um in heathrow which is not too far from here in central London

and a bakery called the Flower Station who make beautiful breads and sell them in several farmers markets across London and in both situations they've got great perfectly fresh bread that they haven't got a home to go to in In fact, they delivered, didn't they, more to us than we could fit in the mash tun. And so everyone that was in the bar that day, we asked them to take a loaf of bread away and we managed to end up with zero surplus, surplus bread, if you like, because it was sort of surplus for the second time. Toast Ale was founded by Tristram Stewart, who was also the founder of Feedback, an environmental organization that campaigns to end food waste at every level of the food system.

All of the profits that are made by Toast Ale cycle back into the Feedback Charity organization. Tristram said as we launched that he hopes that the success of Toast Ale donates enough money through sales to Feedback that means Feedback are successful in putting Toast Ale out of business i.e. Feedback will eliminate surplus bread and then we have no more bread to brew so absolutely it's all about a business making money giving those monies to feedback, to campaign, to ultimately eliminate both surplus bread and the brand. Nearly half of the bread that's baked in the UK is not eaten, which is a staggering stat and one I struggle to comprehend when I don't ever throw any bread away,

which must mean that my neighbour must throw almost all his or her bread away. which must mean that my neighbour must throw almost all his or her bread away. So when you have someone holding a toast beer in a bottle or in a glass, what is the story that you want to share through that glass? That they're drinking at least a slice of surplus bread that would otherwise be binned, and I think that's a really compelling thing in and of its own, and quite often it makes the listener look at their pint and almost imagine that slice of bread in that bottle or glass. And it just gets people really thinking about their own behavior and about perhaps what they've wasted at home in the last

few days. And so we hope through drinking a great beer, we might encourage a movement. So on the streets of London, I've seen a lot of homeless people and I'm wondering is is there not all is there maybe also ways that all of surplus bread is being diverted to homeless people or why is it being binned and not that and have you had any kind of maybe challenge or criticism in terms of oh you're using the old bread to brew and not to give to people who are hungry or is that a question? It is, and I'm really glad you've raised that, actually, because whilst toast uses only surplus bread, that very definition of surplus is key.

It means it hasn't even got a place to go to feed the needy. And there are a number of examples now in the UK where there is too much bread to donate. People need more than bread to survive and a number of individual bakeries and businesses are saying we've tried many options and we just haven't got a route to give our bread away so can you take it and at the moment it's frustrating because we can't take all of it. We're not brewing every day yet but we're hoping to do hoping to do so in the near future. Also, our profits will go to Feedback, and they have many great initiatives,

but one of them is actually to take some surplus food, generally from field, any produce that's been left there, and they will take that and make sure that that is diverted to the needy. So within Feedback, there is an element of making sure that we're passing food on where we can. What Toast is doing is taking bread that has no other place to go. And businesses need us as an outlet. We asked Vanessa to describe the process of brewing a batch of toast. For the brews down here, we use the first one, 70 kilos, and the second one, 88 kilos of bread.

So it's quite a lot of bread that you have to chop into small pieces. The bread is only one third of what you use. The rest we use normal molded barley that you will use making any beer. So we use two thirds of molded barley, this case pale pale mold to make a pale ale and then we mix it with the bread uh well it makes it quite challenging uh because i didn't realize but i put first the mold and then the bread and bread floats so it makes it quite difficult to mix it all together. For those home brewers, the recipe is online and you can brew at home.

A bit of advice, put the bread first, leave it soaking, and then add your moulds. Yes, you learn for the second brew. Yeah, I learn for the second brew. What's the website? The website on toast. Toastale.com. Yeah, so you can find the recipe there. And everybody is welcome to steal it and make their own beer at home with your bread leftover. Yes, absolutely.

Because whilst we can talk to big sources of commercial surplus bread, we can't knock on everyone's front door and take the ends of their loaves or their leftovers. And so that was always part of the plan very early. We asked our first partner brewery, Hackney Brewery, to take their commercial recipe down to a home-brewed 25-litre batch. And we've shared that so that home brewers can brew their leftovers. Great.

I think it's time for a pint. Yay! Thank you. Since we spoke with Vanessa and Julie, Toast has brewed dozens of batches, and they are expanding what a fantastic idea. Here's Rob Hopkins again. It's one of those things which is so obvious. And we've been sort of playing with our own version of that here,

working with the almond thief who are a bakery here in totness who make the best bread i have ever eaten in my whole life and who've become a really really who are doing really really well they've only been going for two or three years or something but they're really fantastic and so we recently made a barley wine using their rye sprouted sourdough bread. So the surplus bread that they had left over, we've made a beer that we call the Barrel Thief, which is currently ageing in a barrel in our warehouse

and which will be coming out, I think, in a few months. Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm the grower for the Armantake Bakery. Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm the grower for the Armond's Lake Bakery. Recently, we browned down some of our sprouted wheat bread, re-toasted it actually, and browned it off. So the New Line Brewery, in a collaboration, could make some lovely beer with it. And can you describe where we are right now? We're right in front of the bakery,

so we're just standing by the bread. And you grow some of the grain, right? Can you tell us just a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So the idea is that we need to make the bakery unique, and the only way to do that is to grow your own grain and process your own grain, is to grow your own grain and process your own grain, mill it and make speciality breads from it. Wonderful, thank you. Cheers. There's so many different things that we could be brewing with and it's such a lovely way to to start to knit economies back together again and and get around the problems of waste food and lots of transition groups of coming up with

interesting ways of using waste food there's a great project in fishguard in wales where they use surplus food from local shops supermarkets that would otherwise be thrown away and then they have a cafe where they turn that food into affordable meals. And they also offer a lot of local young people who want to go into catering the opportunity to train, to become cooks and chefs. So there's lots that we can do, but I particularly love the idea of toast. Although I haven't actually had any yet. So if you go and see them, you must bring us back a bottle. I'd like to try some. New Lion Brewery recently made a beer called Circular Stout in partnership with GrowCycle, an organisation with the aim of keeping coffee waste out of landfills by using it to grow mushrooms, compost and biofuel. Rob met the folks at GrowCycle back in 2012. They're mushrooms just on coffee waste that they sourced from within Exeter, within the city of Exeter.

And then they started playing around with mixing our spent grains from the brewing process in with the coffee and found that it worked really, really well. So their mix is now like a third our spent grains or something, and then the coffee as well in there. So they were growing oyster mushrooms. coffee as well in there so so they were growing oyster mushrooms and traditionally there's something called oyster stout where when they were making a stout they would throw a few actual oysters uh in with the stout that was a kind of traditional thing so we were just playing around with the idea for the local entrepreneur forum the following year of what an oyster mushroom stout would look like and it's kind of counterintuitive you know people don't generally put mushrooms in beer but matt made a made a stout and then infused it with with oyster mushrooms and we called it circular stout the circular economy in a glass because it felt there was that really nice thing if they used our grains they grew the mushrooms we made the mushrooms then you know

there's a lovely model going on there and actually it was really really nice it was really really nice a lot of people have been saying oh could you make that mushrooms that circular stout again so we might have to do it again but that's the kind of nice thing it's kind of collaborative things that you can do when you have those relationships you know we made the black oat mild with holly using locally grown black oats We make a chilli beer using chillies from the South Devon Chilli Farm. This lovely sort of emerging, interconnected, growing network of local food producers, and we feel very much part of that.

We would like to thank everybody for coming here today. We really appreciate you being here. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. Today, obviously, we've had a great kick-tapping here at Volumax, tapping into our stout and a couple of our other beers. We hope you've enjoyed the beer. Hopefully that was good. We're in San Jose, California, about an hour south of San Francisco,

right in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's San Francisco Beer Week here, which is a huge event that takes place each year to celebrate craft beer and the craft beer community in the Bay Area. But the celebration in this jam-packed brew pub is one of a kind. With its history of high-tech entrepreneurialism and ferocious competition, With its history of high-tech entrepreneurialism and ferocious competition, Silicon Valley might not appear to be the most likely place to find a cooperatively owned brewery. We came here to find out more. We're a democracy. One share, one vote, one membership. It's all the same.

Thank you all for coming. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. Peace out. So, I'm standing out here with Emmy, and we just stepped outside of the brew pub where a bunch of people were drinking and celebrating, and it was pretty loud, so we're out on the street right now. And can you just maybe

introduce yourself and tell us why we're here today my name is emmy mendoza and we're here today because the eminem co-op brew pub was at that bar and we were trying to get people to become members and we were celebrating our our beers our new stout beer that's out. And they're carrying all three of our beers, so that's a big celebration for us as well. Plus, it's San Francisco Beer Week, so this was kind of our event. Great. Yeah. How did Umber and Burry get started?

How long have you been involved, and if you want to maybe have an origin story? Yeah, so there was a guy who came to San Jose from Austin, Texas and there's a brewpub co-op or co-op brewpub in Austin and he looked around San Jose and said, you guys should have a cooperative brew pub down here. And nobody knew what that meant. And so he kind of educated us. And then he really kind of pushed us towards adopting bylaws and getting a first kind of board, board members, so that we could incorporate with the state of California. So we did that.

And then the next step was to kind of elect a formal board. And when that was happening, there were like 17 guys that stood up because they wanted one of the seven positions. And I looked at that and said, that's crazy. Like, there should be at least one woman in there. And so I stood up and said, I want to run as well. And I was a shoo-in because I was a girl. I asked Emmy, why a co-op? The main thing with the co-op is that for San Jose and for Silicon Valley, you know, there are a lot of entrepreneurs here. There's a lot of us who, you know, a lot of people who want to have their own business. And this is a way that you can have your own business

by basically pooling our money together and all of us together developing this business. You know, you can be on the board or you can be a volunteer. You can be involved in some way or another. And we're building a business. And I think that is the thing that is appealing to everybody. Again, this is a place for innovation and entrepreneurs, but unless you have a lot, a lot of money,

there are venture capital people out there, and some of them are involved with us, but most of us are not in that kind of league. So $150, you can be part of, owner of a business. And so what's your motto? So early on, somehow, somewhere, somebody said it one time, and it was basically how we kind of talked people into becoming members, that if you drink at the bar, you should own the bar.

And so that appeals to everybody. Everybody says, that makes sense. You're're right i'm at the bar a lot so i should own it i should own the bar so and then uh so when you become a member you get a share yeah that's right yeah that you get a share per person one share per person and that's really at this point about like voting rights like we don't have any... The shares aren't worth anything at this point, but someday when the thing is running and it's profitable, then that share is how we're going to be dividing up

any profits that we're making. Whether we decide to do something for charitable purposes or anything like that, it's really too soon for that. We're paying our bills right now. We don't really have any profit right now. So in the future, the share could lead to a share in the profit. But for now, the share means that you have a vote. So you have everybody has an equal say in what happens. Exactly. Exactly. So how many members? I think we've

been at about 450 members for the last couple of months and then today we're probably at 460. I think we got at least 10 new members today. I asked Emmy how it felt to be part of a co-op. One of the appealing things is that it is a

community of people and that's that part is really interesting because we have people from all kind of different walks of life, and we're all working together. Seriously, we probably would not have met each other. We would not all be friends. We would not know each other if it wasn't for the co-op. So there's a big social component to it,

as well as the whole sense of pooling all of our skills together on this. So it is a community, I really think, but then this is just how I think too, but it is a community building thing. And that's partly why I joined it. I joined it for other reasons too, but that part appeals to me. You're one of the main reasons that you decided to join was because... It's the development of a community that has kind of a financial backing to it or a financial piece to it.

You know, we want to build it into a business. And then it's about beer. It's a very social thing. So, yeah, those are my reasons for being involved. Thank you. In the earliest times in the Sumerian era, women were the main brewers and retailers of beer. Here's Randy Mosher again. era, women were the main brewers and retailers of beer. Here's Randy Mosher again. One of the symbols of availability of beer is a bush or a broom that would be placed outside the house that would indicate beer was available for sale here today. And that's also a form that was used in medieval Europe as well, that that bush, that ale bush would be, you know, hung on the outside of

the house or placed somewhere prominently as a kind of a sign saying, hey, I've got beer today. Because the ale wives, there was beer brewed institutionally at, like, palaces and at religious institutions, anywhere they had a lot of people to kind of take care of. Those were operated by men on a larger, somewhat more industrial scale. But women brewed a lot of beer on a domestic scale for their own use, for the neighbor's use, and the community. And it was a good source of income for people. And they didn't necessarily have dedicated brew houses in their houses. They would have a communal set of pots and pans that

were passed around. When one person had them, you know, a week later they had beer, and then it would be the next woman and the next woman and the next woman. From its earliest days, brewing has been a social, even communal, practice. Here's Randy with more on this relational perspective. Beer's always had this reputation for kind of letting people chill out and hang out. You know, Here's Randy with more on this relational perspective. walks through our door we're kind of cousins we can have a discussion we can be civilized we may disagree about politics or religion or whatever but while we're here we'll all be friends and uh i think there's a certain amount of that that's always been around in beer in a new line brewery says on all of our things crafted in totness we are seen as being a community brewery and we're seen as being a brewery that's doing something quite unusual and innovative what i'd love to do is have a wall where we have each of the different beers that we've created and tells the story about why we did that and what we were trying to do with

that because even though we've only been going for three years already if you lay all of those things out in one place it's really fascinating you know the the different connections and why we did that with those why we made a tonnage pound beer and an atmos ale and uh that we made a beer with the hilly field when they were threatened with losing their ability to operate their sustainable woodland project and already in three years that those those bottles if you were to line them all up already start to tell a really really fascinating story, I think. And hopefully history will look back on us as being one of the key threads of the regeneration of this place.

So this show is called Upstream, and the idea is that you have the problems of our current economic system and you keep going upstream to figure out what is the root of the problem. So how do you see craft beers addressing this kind of root problem? One of the root problems is this idea that business works. As soon as you start a business, one of the first questions you're asked is, you know, when are you going to franchise it? And what's your export plans? Rather than the question of how are you really going to root really really deeply in the

place where you live and that's you know one of the questions that runs through transition it runs through a whole lot of new economy stuff you know how do you really really deeply embed in the place where you are so that you become of that place you become a celebration of that place, you're able to celebrate it to the rest of the world. So for us, it's not a case of we want New Line Brewery in 10 years time to be absolutely massive. You know, we want it to find the right size. You know, there will be a size where we're viable, where we're creating work for people, and where we can innovate in other ways you know i often say when i do talks you know i've got four sons and if my sons just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and carried on growing till they were about 40 feet tall it would be really quite deeply terrifying

and i would have a sense that something was really quite out of kilter with nature but we don't have the same idea for our economy you know it's actually what we want our kids to go to about that high and then grow in other ways to become kinder more skillful more compassionate and that's what we really want to do that's what business should be doing i think not thinking how when do we start exporting pandit uh pale ale to china you know there's something's gone deeply wrong, I think, when that happens. So for me, the challenge for the next 20 years is how our economies come home, is how our economies really embed themselves in the place where they are, become much more connected, that you're able to start to weave together the different threads of a resilient economy. I think in many ways,

globalisation has come through the economy of a place like Totnes with a pair of scissors and severed a lot of those connections that made an economy like this resilient over centuries. And a lot of what Transition is doing is trying to weave those different threads back together again. And a brewery, based on those kind of principles,

can do that kind of thing really beautifully. So for me, it's about designing businesses that are really connected to the place and are always deepening that connection. I will have a glass of the Pandit please. Oh sure. Great. Thank you. Cheers.

Cheers. Cheers. Good health. Good health. Thank you to Mod Gunn, Antoine featuring Cities of Eve, and Pele for the music that you heard in this episode. And thank you to Lanterns for our theme music. To hear more episodes from Upstream,

or to find out more about any of our guests from this episode, please visit upstreampodcast.org. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Upstream Podcast. Thank you.