Summer is the perfect time for stress-free relaxation with a beer in hand.
It's in those summer moments that nagging, worrisome questions weighing on you throughout the rest of the year suddenly become smaller and less heavy.
Questions like, "How am I going to pay rent next month?" and "What is my parent's Netflix password again?" just melt away as you sit back in your lawn chair, crack open a cold brew, and enjoy the statistically too-warm weather.
Beer has no labels. Photo via iStock.
But here's a question you probably don't consider in those moments: What if that beer you're drinking could help cut down on food waste?
This summer, thanks to a brewery in England, that might seriously be an option.
Stay with me because this is actually really cool.
The beer is called "Wasted," and it's a pear-flavored ale crafted by Northern Monk Brewery in Leeds.
It's made of overripe pears and discarded croissants and brioche.
Why would anyone make a beer out of old food?
To make the beer, Northern Monk partnered with The Real Junk Food Project, a "pay as you feel" organization that runs cafes that make meals out of discarded food.
As such, "Wasted" is an aptly-named zero-waste beer.
Even the glass bottle it comes in is 100% recyclable and the used hops from the beer making process are donated to local farms where they are repurposed as fertilizer.
"Brewing beer naturally creates waste, so we wanted to find a way to change that," brewery founder Russell Bisset told Metro. "We saw this as an opportunity to challenge pre-conceived notions of what beer can be made with and highlight the kinds of products that go to waste on a daily basis."
A zero-waste beer is all well and good, but how does it taste?
According to Daniel Tapper at The Guardian, it tastes "incredible." And the Beer O'Clock Show, a beer-reviewing podcast in the U.K., calls it "well balanced" with "slight fruit flavors and an easy soft finish."
Even if you're not a fan of hoppy beers, you have to admit a zero-waste beer is an intriguing idea.
In the U.S. alone, over 6 billion pounds of food is wasted every year. We don't often think about it when we throw out an old(ish) banana or refuse to eat the weird, crusty end-slice of a bread loaf — but it all adds up.
Food that was pulled out of a single garbage can in Manhattan in 2007. Photo by Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images.
Committing to a zero-waste lifestyle is an exhaustive and difficult process, and it certainly isn't manageable for everyone. But there are little things you can do to help reduce the insane amount of waste piling up all over the world.
One of those things involves drinking a pear-flavored beer. Which, you know, ... doesn't sound too bad.
