Bread beer - Pain de Minuit ®

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Pain de Minuit : our story

Craftsmanship. Innovation. Common sense.

June 2018: Martin lives in Lille, France, the land of baguettes and gastronomy.
He craft-brews beer from water, cereals, yeast and hops.

Vianney, an artisan baker, lovingly makes bread from water, cereals and yeast.
His customers' desires are hard to predict.
Several unsold and stale loaves are still on his shelves when at midnight he starts his day preparing the next day's bread.

Martin and Vianney study the ecological impact of their products.
They discover that a kilo of cereals, the raw material for their products, costs the planet an enormous amount of energy.
They decided to get organised:
"If being eco-friendly means upcycling an exceptional product to craft a second exceptional product, then I'm eco-friendly.
We've got our work cut out!" one of them even quipped.
Vianney and his baker friends began collecting their stale bread.
Martin set up a collection round and a beer recipe that allowed him to substitute his cereal ingredients with the collected unsold bread.

When the twelfth stroke of Midnight rang, the previous day's stale bread was added to the brews.
The first bottle of Pain de Minuit was tasted 7 weeks later, at Midnight.
No Pain. No Beer.

Pain de Minuit Bread Beer: how does it work?

Discover our Pain de Minuit COLLECTE collection solution and the future of sustainable brewing, Pain de Minuit

Pain de Minuit Collecte

Our Pain de Minuit COLLECTE app is the 1st free national platform for collecting unsold bread.
Thanks to our 3 processing centres, we are able to collect unsold bread from professionals in the sector, all across France.
Our professional partners declare their unsold bread.
We come to collect it the next morning to give it a chance to shine differently.
* subject to certain collection and accounting conditions.
Learn more about our anti-waste app Pain de Minuit Collecte

Pain de Minuit, the future of sustainable brewing

Once the unsold bread is recovered, sorted and processed, it can join our brews.
We replace a large portion of our brewing cereals with this stale bread.
Once ready, the beer is sold at our retail points and on our website.
Buy Pain de Minuit online or find a retailer

Bread beer in numbers

No Pain. No Beer.

Food waste: bread

Today we produce nearly 4 billion tonnes of food.
1.3 billion tonnes end up in the bin
That's the equivalent of France's entire aperitif biscuit consumption for 18,000 years.
All this food could feed one and a half planets.
At the top of this ranking, bread, the most wasted food.
38% of bread produced in France is not consumed.

Craftsmanship: Bread beer

Beer is not an ecological product.
The alcohol in your beer is obtained by fermenting the starch from brewing cereals.
300g of brewing cereals are on average needed to produce one litre of craft beer.

Beer and bread: energy-intensive raw materials.

700 litres of water are needed to produce 1 baguette.
450 litres of water are needed to produce 1kg of brewing cereals.
Nearly 500g of CO2 are emitted to produce either one.
Wasting a baguette means all this energy is used for nothing.

Pain de Minuit: the carbon footprint

By replacing part of our brewing cereals with your unsold stale bread, we improve the carbon footprint of our bread beer.
A 33cL Pain de Minuit saves (or rather avoids wasting)
1 slice of stale bread
6L of water
4.5g of CO2

Craftsmanship. Innovation. Common sense.

Our values and our mission.

We craft innovative beer with purpose.

Retailers, join us 🙋🏼‍♂️ Consumer, buy Pain de Minuit 👋