Oktoberfest season is here. Starting 25 September, 7 million visitors will flock to the Munich festival for a pint-fuelled mix of music, beer, food, and revelry.
Beer is the focal point of the event, but its organisers are also showing how the beverage industry is driving sustainable change.
For years, Oktoberfest Munich has tried to reduce its waste and environmental impacts – a sign of how the beer industry as a whole is moving with the times.
Elsewhere, beer producers big and small are also feeding into a sustainable economy as they supply feedstock for beer-based biomaterials that reduce emissions.
Here are the surprising links between beer and sustainability.
Oktoberfest cleans up
Beer may be the focal point of Oktoberfest, but the German drinking festival is also known for its long-term initiatives to cut waste and limit environmental impacts.
The local government banned disposable crockery in 1999 at large-scale events, leading to a 90 percent reduction in festival waste.
Renewable electricity makes up a large portion of the festival’s energy needs. Lately, it has been re-using water used to clean beer mugs for its sanitary facilities.
Wurst gets a biotech makeover
Oktoberfest food has been getting the green treatment too, with the festival proving a valuable testing ground for emerging vegan meat brands.
Traditionally, Oktoberfest is associated with Bavaria’s meat-heavy regional cuisine. Dishes like Hendel (roast chicken) and the all-famous wurst (sausage) are part of its drinking culture.
Yet classic cuisine is getting a biotech makeover in response to consumer demand for less environmentally harmful vegan alternatives.
The festival is increasing its vegan food options each year, reaching out to alternative protein companies to expand its vendor offerings.
In 2022, the festival joined forces with Munich-based alt-protein startup Greenforce to offer a vegan Weißwurst (white sausage) for the first time. One of those who invested in Greenforce in 2021 was Michael Käfer, a businessman who heads one of the Oktoberfest’s most exclusive drinking taverns, the Käfer Wiesnschänke.
Oktoberfest supply deals are a huge boost for any vegan supplier. Approval at a German beer fest where carnivorous tastes reign supreme is a marketing coup for any company seeking mainstream market acceptance.
Purists may argue that a beer festival is no place for meatless proteins. Yet the biomanufacturing process used to make many alt-proteins today is not so dissimilar to the way beer has been produced for thousands of years.
Precision fermented vegan proteins are manufactured using the same basic principles as those deployed in beer brewing, highlighting the biotechnological kinship between beer and the most innovative vegan meats.
Putting beer in our buildings
Oktoberfest’s sustainability efforts are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the beer industry is finding niches in a greener economy.
Around the world, startups are linking up with beer producers to turn ordinary brewery waste into extraordinary natural materials that can replace plastics and other everyday carbon-intensive materials.
The push to use beer waste for sustainable manufacturing is happening in the hometown of Oktoberbest itself, in Munich.
Here, university students at the Technical University have proposed a way to re-use beer production waste. Their university spinoff startup HopfON has found a way of using up the biomass discarded at the hop harvesting stage.
Hop harvesting comes right at the start of the beer supply chain. Currently, the practice is highly wasteful. Only the flower of the hop plant is used to make beer. This means that from the total plant matter harvested, just 20 percent goes into the final product. The remaining 80% normally get thrown away.
Right now, waste hop material has little value. But with a little processing, it could become raw material for other industries.
HopfON has figured out a process to take hop waste and manufacture acoustic panels, thermal insulation and building boards used in construction. The waste it uses comes from hop farms in Germany’s Hallertau region.
Using hop discards to make architectural elements unlocks an innovative way of meeting national emissions reduction targets.
Hop-based biomaterials can displace high-carbon materials like plastics from our buildings.
This could be a huge win for climate policy globally and in the EU: around half of the world’s resource extraction is used on buildings and construction. The sector contributes 36% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of this is down to the non-renewable materials that are commonly used in buildings, like insulation.
Beer-based bio-leather
The beer industry has massive potential to contribute towards a circular economy. This is a type of economy where waste materials from one industry gets transformed into raw materials for another. Circular economies tend to be more sustainable because using waste reduces the amount of raw materials we need to freshly cultivate or extract.
Beer has an important part to play in a circular system because it is a global industry whose supply chain generates large amounts of organic waste.
Importantly, this low-cost waste contains large amounts of valuable materials: nutrients that could serve as agricultural fertilisers, food supplements, and fibres for strong building materials.
Apart from harvesting, the other major waste generator in the supply chain is the brewing itself. Brewing creates a byproduct known as brewer’s spent grain, a brown, solid mush, a mixture of leftover hops, yeast, barley and water.
Brewer’s spent grain accounts for 85 percent of brewery by-products. Estimates say the EU alone produces around 3.4 million tonnes each year and every 100 litres of beer creates around 20 kg of the stuff.
One of the most established beer waste biomaterial startups, the UK’s Arda Biomaterials, is pushing beer post-brewery waste to its limits.
Arda has found a way to turn the spent grain into sustainable leathers, a process that takes advantage of the plant-based protein found inside it.
Arda’s vegan beer-based leathers are pitched towards growing demand from the fashion and automotive industries for more sustainable, ethical alternatives to animal leather.
Arda is known for eye-catching collaborations with cosmopolitan brands. The company paired up with London craft beer producer Beavertown Brewery for a collection of beer-based leather fashion accessories released in 2024. In 2024 it also unveiled a convincing mock-snakeskin handbag with the fashion label Been, using waste materials sourced from London’s “Beer Mile’.
Beer bags from UnPlastic and Empa
The reputation of beer waste as a biomaterial feedstock is rising because it is so easy to turn it into all-rounder materials that can be useful across many applications.
Swiss researchers at the Empa institute have developed a way to turn brewer’s waste into nanocellulose, which can be made into biodegradable food packaging.
The process starts with freeze-drying the spent grain, which turns the brown, flaky substance into a translucent white gel that can be worked into thin, flexible packaging. Their innovation is particularly useful for packaging heat-sensitive foods like meat.
Beer waste has great potential as a feedstock for making plastic-free packaging. Just this year, EU-funded project BIOSUPPACK announced it has developed a compostable packaging for food, cosmetics, and household cleaning. The material is a polymer known as PHB.
The ultimate aim of the project, which runs to 2026, is to make a highly sustainable, cost-effective packaging. Beer waste could one day furnish us with genuinely affordable biobased alternatives to petrochemical materials.
Brewed food
Big brewing companies are also trying to tap into their brewing waste. Carlsberg Sweden is now part of a project called Brewed and Renewed, investigating how spent brewery grains can become human food.
The brown mush that comes out of the brewing process may look unappetising as a snack, but its basic components are not far from bread or breakfast cereals – rich in fibre, antioxidants, minerals and protein.
There’s certainly no shortage of feedstock to experiment with: Sweden alone generates 80, 000 tonnes of brewer’s spent grain per year. Yet as with any industrial scaling project, there will be technical hurdles to overcome along the way.
Beer waste-based ingredients would tackle at least two sustainability issues at the same time, ensuring that the fertiliser and water that went into cultivating beer do not go to waste while also reducing the resource demands of the human food system.
Making food from spent grain is not a new idea. Switzerland’s UpGrain has already been using the byproduct to produce nutritious barley-based ingredients for the food industry. Dutch retailer Albert Heijn has been stocking bread varieties made from UpGrain’s barley ingredient and these contain up to 120% more protein and 900% more fibre than conventional products.
One practical problem with using a brewer’s spent grain is how to store large amounts of it safely. The substance is moist and nutrient-rich, which can encourage rapid microbial growth. Generally, spent grain startups have solved the problem by drying it as soon as possible and grinding it to a powder.
Brewed and Renewed will run between 2025 and 2025. Alongside Carlsberg Sweden, food companies like Bageri Gruppen as well as the sustainability non-profit Axfood are participating.
Projects like Brewed and Renewed show there is industry appetite for circular initiatives that turn around beer waste feedstock. With Oktoberfest season in full swing, now is the perfect time to support this green beer transition and its circular efforts.
