Dutch Brewery Crafts Beer Using Old Christmas Trees

Lowlander Beer, a botanical brewery based in Amsterdam, is collecting unwanted trees and using their needles to brew a Winter IPA as well as a Botanical Brut IPA …a limited edition sparkling beer made from spruce and Champagne yeast.

“We brew with botanicals and had a simple idea,” Lowlander Founder and self-styled ‘Chief Botanical Officer’ Frederik Kampman told the Drinks Business…

 “Christmas trees that normally end up with the garbage give a second life by brewing botanical beer. Our campaign was so successful that we now need your help to process more than 1000 trees into special botanical beers.”

About 600 kilos of needles are needed to produce the 2019 batch of Winter IPA.

The Amsterdam Botanical Gardens, Amsterdam’s RAI Convention Centre, and many of the city’s restaurants have or will soon be donating trees to the effort.

Lowlander is also offering to collect any unwanted trees from individuals who wish to donate and to help defer the substantial collection and processing costs of the Lowlander Tree to Table Project, they’ve set up a crowdfunding page.

“We need at least €60,000 to process all donated Christmas trees,” the brewery has said. “For our ambition of zero waste and to process even more logged-on trees that are now on the waiting list, we ideally pick up more so that we can really reuse all trees from peak to root. Put simply, the more money we can collect, the more trees we can process.”

Those who invest in the Lowlander’s ambitious (and we expect delicious) project will receive a range of rewards ranging from the brewery’s acclaimed botanical beers, to an exclusive 5-course Tree to Table dinner, where the discarded Christmas trees are not only used to make the beers, but also the evening’s dishes.

Lowlander Beer was founded in 2016 by Frederik Kampman who took his years of working with botanicals at a gin distillery in the UK and applied those herbal directions to his new brewery in the Netherlands.