When you live in Belgium and love the taste of a good, fresh beer, it’s like you’re in heaven already. The number of Belgian breweries is almost endless, resulting in an even longer list of beers. Given, some of them are (a lot) better than others but there certainly is a lot to choose from. Whether you like them brown, blond, red, sweet, bitter, refreshing or filling: there’s something for every single taste out there. Yet even then, there are some things I’d never heard of before. Some kinds of beer brewing that are surprisingly new, and – something which is quite shocking to a Belgian – not Belgian.
That certainly goes for Wasted Potential, a Finnish series of beers made by the micro-brewery Ant Brew. As the name would suggest, the assortment aims to reduce waste to a minimum and that includes the use of goose poo. Yes, you’ve heard that right. It sounds disgusting, yet hear us out.
Zero waste
In order to get the story behind Wasted Potential, we first should look at Lahti, the Finnish town where Ant Brew is located. By 2050, Lahti aims to be completely zero waste and circular. Which is one of the reasons why the city was named European Green Capital of the year, inspiring a lot of locals to go all out on sustainability. At Ant Brew, that resulted in Wasted Potential, a series of beers made from different kinds of waste. For the recipes, different ingredients are being used, ranging from wild herbs over old bread to fruit. And goose poo. Yet rest assured, the poo doesn’t get into your glass. It’s solely used as a fuel to smoke the malt for the beer. And of course, the poo comes directly from the local park where it is collected in order to make it more enjoyable for people to hang out in the park – while drinking a beer, of course.
With the new range of beers, Ant Brew wants to break open the discussion about food waste, the use of garbage, city farming and local food. That’s why the brewery is constantly looking for new ways in which to use ingredients and they definitely did succeed at that in this case. As far as the goose poo beer itself goes, it’s supposed to come out later this summer, although you’ll have to travel to Finland in order to be able to taste it. For more info, check out Ant Brew’s website.
