Better life with upcycle

Better life with upcycle. It's a brewery in Ebina, but if you hear what they use as a raw material, it'll surprise you. Bread crusts.

The parent company is Sakaeya Seipan, a long-established bakery founded in 1923. They make bread for school lunches and sandwich loaves for commercial use, and the crust-trimming process generates more than 400 kg of bread crusts every day. It all started when managing director Kenichi Yoshioka wondered, 'Are we really going to throw away part of the bread we carefully baked while checking the temperature every day?'

There was a brewery in the UK called 'Toast Ale' that made beer from discarded bread, and when they learned about it, they became convinced that 'if anyone in Japan could do it, it would be us.' With no brewing knowledge at all, they reached out to dozens of breweries and started selling through OEM in June 2022. The response was so strong that they opened their own brewery in February 2024.

Bread and beer share the same basic ingredients: malt, water, and yeast. By using bread crusts as a 10 to 30 percent substitute for malt, they create a distinctive flavor. Their flagship 'American Wheat' has a silky mouthfeel from wheat and oats with a clear bitterness, while 'ESB' is a copper-brown beer with the sweetness of malt coming to the front.

They also released a commemorative beer for the brewery's second anniversary, '2nd Anniv. Sour DIPA,' a tropical sour made with Ebina-grown strawberries and pink guava. Not just bread crusts, but they actively incorporate non-standard fruit and other food-loss ingredients too.

Mr. Yoshioka says, 'Even if upcycling is the concept, it means nothing if it isn't delicious as beer,' and they're apparently now working on prototype bread that goes well with beer. Bread into beer, beer into bread. A 100-year-old bakery is trying to create a new cycle.