Spent Barley paper

Did you know that the main ingredient in Beer is Barley?

In the spirit of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”, we’re taking spent barley from local breweries and converting it to gorgeous and textured paper.

For brewers and papermakers alike, the final product tells the story of where it has been sourced.

The goal is just to be able to repurpose someone else’s waste into a Indigenous tree-free spent barley paper. 

We collect spent grain (barley, hops, etc.) left over from the beer-making process and use it to create paper with the beer-makers themselves.

There has been a lot of trial and error with this – but powering through, taking lots of notes to improve upon, and just loving the process have been keeping us going!

The spent barley is residual waste from beer production and would otherwise go to waste. Through this unique recycling process we’re reducing our carbon footprint.

Spent barley has relatively lesser cellulose content, when mixed with cotton pulp, spent barley makes beautiful, unique textured paper.

But with that said, We’ve been able to produce a paper that meets the functional requirements of the end user. Tested it in ink-jet and laser printers and we achieved good success.

This gorgeous paper makes bags, gift wrap, notebook covers, placemats, coasters and is perfect for packaging. 

We believe in circularity that grants the brewers their labels, menus, postcards, and signage for the breweries.

We keep in mind the positive economic and cultural impact, we offer an alternative method for disposing of waste created during the brewing process.

Spent barley paper is an exciting undertaking. Every batch of brew paper is as distinct as its brewer, and we look forward to the fun of helping microbreweries reduce their waste and create marketing materials that reflect, quite literally, their own recipes for locally sourced products.

At bluecatpaper we believe in this strongly enough to try. And we are so excited about the results.

Drink beer. Save forests. Use spent barley paper instead.