GET IN TOUCH

The reluctant protagonist suffers from impostor syndrome from time to time. Really? Can I even make a dent in slowing global warming and helping avert a food crisis? I am now convinced that I can. And I should. With help from our invisible friends. The fungi. With an infinite number of brewers friends in the Asia Pacific and beyond coming on board. Fungi Infinity is coming into being. It sounds disillusional. But, Be More. Be Magic.

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I am at an age now where you look back on the life that you are having and realise everything is laid out for you. My father told me two things. The first one worked out very well. He said, "...marry a girl who can carry two buckets of water." Where he came from, a small town in Canton, that would show two very desirable traits: strength and endurance.

 

So, some twenty years later, I saw this girl... carrying two pails of water down a spiral staircase. The spiral staircase is significant because that is the same kind of staircase you would see at the back of those old houses in Chinatown, Singapore, where my father guided me on the girls I should marry. From being a bookkeeper in a small firm- to a medium-sized factory- to a large property developer and to an international advertising agency, her skills in account collectables and payables became known far and wide in the industry she was in. She then went on and muscled me out of a potential mid-career switch for me to become a brewer. I went back to my full-time job as a lecturer at the Institute of Technical Education. She was saving me from the sweat and toil of a brewer. 

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The second thing he told me was, "There is cash in the trash". There were quite a few news stories back in the 60s about older people found dead with loads of cash stuffed into pillows and such. They were people who apparently just went around picking up trash. So, forty years later, when I was learning how to brew... I first saw CASH - being thrown out as trash. I went into a frenzied overdrive to find out about bsg.

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Pauli Gunter, author of The Blue Economy, demonstrated to the world in the 90s through the

Zero Emission Research Initiative, concepts of circularity, and zero waste. The waste from one industry

became the raw materials for the next. His  project in Africa - The waste from the big commercial

brewery went to mushroom farms built around it. Waste from there became rich feed for chickens

whose waste was collected and fed to fish and also used as organic manure.

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So there were solutions.  My life has been sweet, taking that first advice. Your wife makes beer. What more can a man ask for? So forget the "mushroom will save the world" mantra. Just work. Play. Pay off the mortgages. And so I did. Till I left teaching to help Kim in the new beer business she co-founded. Going around with her to different breweries in Singapore and around the region, I still see the same problem. 

 

So here is the quandary - Big pile of waste that had been shown to produce cash. 20 years on. Still being thrown out. Big breweries say they have sustainable practices in place. They sell bsg to feed companies for - US$10-20 per ton? Some in the region say up to US$45 per ton. Then what about the craft breweries?  I know the problems involved in the use of BSG. Experienced it all those years  ago.

 

I now have the solutions. it has been fermenting in me for 20 years.