The sandwich you didn’t buy on your last Eurostar journey may be coming back to you in a can of beer on another trip.
The rail operator has been working with a French brewery, Pain de Minuit, whose name—’midnight bread’—gives a hint to their business. The company rescues the bread from Eurostar’s unsold sandwiches and uses it in its brewing process. They’ve been collecting from the company’s European trains and will soon get the cross-Channel leftovers as well.
Pain de Minuit, which produces a number of different styles of beer, also works with over a thousand French bakeries that supply unsold bread.
Using bread as a base for brewing goes back at least as far to the ancient Sumerians, and ancient recipes have helped modern companies work on new ways, with Belgian companies, including the Brussels Beer Project, among the leaders. Unsold bread replaces about 20% of the malt, giving the beer a “pleasant caramel/toasty edge to the palate.”
The process starts with drying the bread at a low temperature and grinding it back into flour. Then it is mixed the flour with barley malt to brew the beer. After brewing, the spent grain is collected, dried and can be used to bake the next round of bread.
