Great Moments In Brewing – Old Guinness Beer Becomes Christmas Tree Fertilizer

Thousands of kegs of unused beer went bad back in 2020, thanks to a global pandemic that shutdown bars, pubs and restaurants around the world, forcing breweries to come up with creative ways to get rid of them.

And Guinness certainly did…

Just like the majority of the world, Guinness didn’t see the coronavirus coming. The Diageo-owned brewery had millions of gallons of its distinctive Irish Dry Stout kegged and in place at venues around the world and floods of unused beer which went stale as the world locked down is came back to the company…and it was on them to get rid of it.

Aidan Crowe, director of operations at the brewery, explained to the Independent  during the early stages of lockdown, Guinness decided to support its bar, pub and restaurant vendors by collecting kegs that would have otherwise gone to waste.

“It was very, very important right from the start of the lockdown to support the on-trade as much as we could. That’s why we took the decision to bring back all of the beer from the on-trade.”

(Courtesy Guinness)

But after looking out for its customers Guinness was faced with another problem…how to dispose of unprecedented volumes of now bad beer in an environmentally way, and that’s when its use as a tree fertilizer came up…

In addition to using the unsold beer as willow and Christmas fertilizer, Guinness, also funneled some through anaerobic digesters to produce bio-gas and diverted some it for making compost.

Asked by the Press Association how many liters Guinness beer had been returned, Mr. Crowe was unsure….

“You’d probably make me cry if I started to add it all up, but it’s hundreds of thousands of kegs and we’ve still got some products to decant and we’ve still got some markets that haven’t finished returning their beer to us. So a lot of beer and a lot of kegs.”

And while we’re on the subject of beer going to waste during the pandemic there’s also this…

50 MILLION PINTS OF BEER COULD BE WASTED IN UK PUBS

And that number kept growing…

70 MILLION PINTS OF BEER MAY BE DESTROYED IN THE UK