Beyond Belief Brewing Co is to launch a range of beers made from waste pasta in grocery.
Pale Ale (4.7% abv), IPA (5.0% abv) and Vienna Lager (4.2% abv) will launch into Ocado this month (rsp: £8.50-£8.75/4x330ml), with further listings to be announced in the coming weeks.
Beyond Belief Brewing Co is an offshoot of pasta supplier and fourth-generation family business Ugo Foods, whose team began brewing with pasta waste during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.
“We were trying to find a solution to this sort of unavoidable waste,” said Freddie Ugo, who is head of brand at Beyond Belief Brewing Co and the great-grandson of Ugo Foods founder Luigi Ugo.
“We didn’t have any confidence from anyone else around us that it would work, so, initially, we couldn’t invest in any equipment. We were literally just boiling [the pasta] to hell in pots and pans to see if we could make a home-brew using pasta instead of barley – and it worked.”
Scaling up
Following on from the initial experiments, Ugo Foods invested in “some small-scale equipment and we did a larger-scale trial, using a composite of pasta and barley”, said Freddie.
“Once we proved we could do that, it allowed us to go to some larger brewers with 2000-3000 litre fermentation vessels, and really perfect the process.”
The result was Beyond Belief Brewing Co’s trio of brews, each made from 50% barley and 50% pasta. While it was possible to brew with 100% pasta, “the main reason we did 50:50 is we found it led to the best sugar extraction that we can get, and it would allow us to make any style possible.”
“If we did 100% pasta, we would be able to do wheat beers – we’d probably be able to do a pale ale or a blonde lager – but there are certain styles, like stout, that we wouldn’t be able to do because it would change the organoleptic quality too much.”
Beyond Belief Brewing Co has patented its method of replacing surplus pasteurised dough as a one-to-one base malt replacement in the UK, and has already started experimenting beyond pasta.
For instance, it recently launched an Irish-style stout (4.5% abv) made from waste flapjack from “one of the largest baked goods manufacturers in the UK” via its webstore (£3.10/440ml). Further innovations are in the pipeline,
In the coming months, Beyond Belief Brewing Co has plans to secure further retail listings and start licensing out its patent to big brewers.
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