Capital Brewing Co.'s Salvaged Series launches at GABS 2023

Canberra-based brewery, Capital Brewing Co., has created a series of beers for this year's Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular (GABS) Festival using ingredients that would otherwise be landfill-bound.

Every year in Australia, a shocking 25 per cent of fruit never reaches shops solely because of imperfections in shape, contributing to Australia's 7.6 million tonnes of food waste annually.

With these confronting statistics in mind, the brewers at Capital Brewing Co. decided to create four beers to launch at GABS 2023 that make use of ingredients that would otherwise be thrown out.

Wade Hurley, Head Brewer at Capital Brewing Co., took to Instagram to share insights into the four brews and how working with local growers and suppliers has created something special to share with the public.

He said the Salvaged Series was a concept specifically created to launch at GABS, a festival that has been sharing the love of craft beer for over a decade.

"We wanted to use some fruit that would potentially not make its way into the markets and probably get thrown away and take that fruit and put into a beer and make something really unique and creative.

"We came up with four different beers, all of whom are very different and all use products that would probably get thrown away," he said.

Capital Brewing Co.'s first creation, the Salvaged Salvador, is an apple and rhubarb pastry crumbled sour.

"We worked with Southern Harvests Association to make this beer using apples that were too small for them to sell into the supermarkets and some rhubarb, which they had trouble selling.

"So we took those fruits and blended them up, made them into a nice puree. Threw that into a super sour base beer with a little bit of lactose, vanilla, cinnamon, and man was that final outcome delicious," said Hurley.

Next in the line-up the Rescued Ruby, which Hurley said was created from "blackberries that we actually picked ourselves here in Canberra, as well as some plums that my friends grew in excise in their backyard.

"We took those fruits and blended them up and threw it into a really tasty 9 per cent stout. The stout was bitter, chocolatey and the fruit really rounded it right out and made it nice and sweet and delicious," he said.

The Leftover Lincoln is a pavlova-inspired sour beer made in collaboration with Ziggy's Fresh Market in Fyshwick.

Using fruit that had seen better days, Hurley said: "We blended all that fruit up, pasteurised it and we threw it into the sour beer. It's got a little bit of lactose in there to give it that creamy pavlova feel, heaps of mango, passionfruit, banana, almost any fruit that you usually throw into pavlova."

And finally, the Liberated Lucy, an alcohol-heavy seltzer featuring sour cherries and cola. "We worked with Hamish, who works at Back Creek Orchards. He had a lot of cherries that he didn't know what to do with, so he ended up making cherry juice for the first time.

"We took some of that cherry juice and we added it to a seltzer base with some cola flavourings as well. It's super sweet, it tastes delicious and it's kind of scary that it's so alcoholic," said Hurley.

GABS 2023 kicks off on 2 June in Sydney and 10 June in Brisbane.

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