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This beer saves venues: Fightback Lager launches

This month sees the launch of the Fightback Brewing Company, whose Fightback Lager aims to raise funds for UK grassroots music venues.

Every pint sold of the beer, a 4.6% craft lager brewed by Manchester’s ShinDigger brewery, will go to Music Venue Trust. It launched on Friday in venues participating in the Fightback Manchester festival (16 to 30 November), and will begin rolling out across venues UK-wide from December 2018.

Richard Smith, director of the Fightback Brewing Company, says: “We’ve been blown away by the enthusiasm for a beer that financially helps the sector. It made sense to all of us to create something that reflects the independent spirit of the grassroots music venue community.”

“Every penny donated to Music Venue Trust by Fightback beer goes directly to supporting a music venue in trouble”

Mark Davyd, CEO of Music Venue Trust, adds: “We are delighted that more and more companies and organisations are emerging with great concepts that can support the network of grassroots music venues to survive and hopefully thrive. Every penny donated to Music Venue Trust by Fightback beer goes directly to supporting a music venue in trouble, facing challenges or under threat of closure.“

“Fightback Lager is a natural addition to our Fightback regional events we have planned for the next year,” adds Gary Prosser who runs the Fightback events. “Any cause that can raise much needed funds to help our grassroots music venues is very welcome indeed.”

Venues can register their interest in Fightback Lager at fightbacklager.com.

 


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Roskilde attendees’ urine turned into beer

In 2015, Roskilde Festival, Denmark’s largest music festival, launched the latest of its many eco-friendly initiatives. ‘From piss to Pilsner’ aimed to collect 25,000 litres of urine from festivalgoers that could be recycled (‘beercycled’) from a pale yellow liquid into another, more desirable, pale yellow liquid: a refreshing fizzy lager.

Now, two years later, the plan has borne fruit, with a Danish microbrewery making use of double that – 50,000l, or 10,000 gallons – to brew a beer it’s dubbed (what else?) Pisner.

Aimed at the “more adventurous drinker”, Pisner contains no urine but is produced from barley grown in fields fertilised with human waste. “When the news that we had started brewing the Pisner came out, a lot of people thought we were filtering the urine to put it directly in the beer, and we had a good laugh about that,” says Henrik Vang, chief executive of the brewery, Norrebro Bryghus.

“If it had tasted even a bit like urine I would put it down, but you don’t even notice”

Around 60,000 bottles of Pisner can be brewed using the urine collected at Roskilde 2015, says Norrebro Bryghus.

In addition to being eco-friendly, it’s apparently very good: “It’s fresh and full at the same time, and it’s a good beer,” one taster, Birden Eldahl, tells Reuters.

“If it had tasted even a bit like urine, I would put it down,” adds Roskilde 2015 attendee Anders Sjögren, “but you don’t even notice.”

 


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