Drink your Christmas tree
Last year, they already announced it: Lowlander was going to brew beer from Christmas trees. Now the time has come: Lowlander Winter IPA is here. You won’t find a beer that feels more Christmassy.
After their appeal to all Dutch people not to throw away their Christmas tree after the holidays, but to donate it to Lowlander, the brewers got to work. The 150 (!) trees were picked by hand, and the spruce needles were preserved and brewed together with juniper berries into a fresh IPA. You can find the result at Appie Heijn.
Waste to taste
Did you know that Dutch people bring around 2.5 million real Christmas trees into their homes every year? A large proportion of them end up on the street, in the shredder or on a bonfire after New Year’s? Lowlander’s Chief Botanical Officer Frederik Kampman thought this could be done differently: “Botanicals literally come from nature, but the botanicals that are valuable to us are often also a waste or residual stream; what is ‘waste’ to one person is packed with ‘taste’ for Lowlander! So when I saw the streets covered with discarded Christmas trees during a run in January 2018, I got the idea of brewing a beer from them the following winter.”
Contribute your needle
Frederik: “Besides brewing a flavorful beer with these Christmas trees, we saw what this appeal achieved in terms of awareness; the impact was enormous! That got us thinking about the following Christmas: what if we tried to prevent Christmas tree waste instead of recycling it?”
That is how the idea arose to grow an organic, sustainable Lowlander Christmas tree forest together with Adopteer een Kerstboom (a local grower that has been committed to reusing Christmas trees for years). For every Winter IPA sold, Lowlander donates €0.05 towards planting trees. Because the more Christmas trees that can be adopted, the less waste there will be. So that more and more Dutch people can enjoy a cozy and sustainable Christmas. If that isn’t a beautiful Christmas thought, we don’t know what is.
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