Brooklyn Brewery is to bring together a collective of breweries from across the world to produce beer using the ancient west African grain fonio.
The ‘Brewing for Impact’ initiative will see breweries from seven countries, including Brooklyn Brewery, Carlsberg and Guinness, create limited-edition beers to highlight the potential of fonio as a grain for use in brewing.
Brooklyn Brewery said the grain had “huge untapped brewing potential as it is drought resistant, and requires no irrigation, pesticides, or fertilisers”.
Throughout 2024, a series of limited-edition brews are to be released (exact markets and dates TBC). Each beer would “spotlight fonio’s remarkable qualities and potential to drive positive change, and a more sustainable future”, Brooklyn Brewery said.
The initiative will kick off this month with the launch of ‘Brooklyn A Dakar’, a pilsner brewed by Brooklyn and Maison Kalao in Senegal.
Breweries from the UK and Ireland signed up to the initiative include Derbyshire’s Thornbridge Brewery and Dublin’s Guinness Brewery. The Thornbridge release is to be a cask-only pale ale, while Brooklyn and Guinness will collaborate on a fonio stout in homage to Guinness’s long history in Africa.
Other brewers taking part include Russian River in the US, Omnipollo and Carlsberg in Scandinavia and Jing-A, from Beijing in China.
Brooklyn’s brewmaster Garrett Oliver, who first brewed a beer using fonio in 2019, said Brewing for Impact was “in some ways the most important work I’ve ever done”.
“If what we’ve started truly catches hold in the industry, we will hopefully start seeing the wider use of a grain that has no need for irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides or other chemical inputs,” he said.
“It also supports soil regeneration while providing a vital source of income for thousands of smallholder farms in west Africa, which are predominantly female-led – all while making some really fantastic beers.”
A portion of the proceeds from all the beer released during the series will also go towards The Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing & Distilling, an organisation founded by Oliver to fund scholarships for black, indigenous and people of colour within the brewing and distilling trades.
Last summer, Brooklyn Brewery teamed up with ethical brewer Brewgooder to launch Fonio Session IPA into Co-op stores.
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