Brewcycle Coffee Briquettes

From Worm Food to Winter Warmth: We're Making Briquettes Now

So you know our worms have been living their best lives on a diet of coffee grounds and shredded cardboard. Well, turns out there's only so much even the hungriest worm can get through, and we've ended up with more shredded paper and coffee waste coming through the door than our compost project alone can handle. Rather than let good raw material go to waste (the whole point of BrewCycle, really), we've started testing something new: briquettes. That's right. The briquettes you burn in your BBQ or wood burner.

Forbidden brownies: freshly pressed briquettes

How it actually works

It's satisfyingly simple. We soak the shredded paper, mix it up with coffee grounds, then squeeze the whole lot into a briquette press and leave it to dry out properly. What comes out the other end is a solid, dense little block of fuel.

The coffee grounds aren't just filler either, they genuinely help. Mixed into the paper pulp, they make the briquettes burn hotter and for longer than paper alone would manage. Turns out your old flat white has a second life as heating.

Why now

We didn't plan this, if we're honest. It's grown organically out of having so much material coming through, more paper and coffee waste than we know what to do with, that expanding felt like the obvious next step rather than a big strategic leap. It's the kind of small-scale testing-and-learning-as-you-go approach we like: try it, see what works, figure out if it's worth scaling before committing to anything bigger.

Dried briquettes ready to keep people warm this winter.

There's also a timing point that matters to us. Winter's creeping in, and we know plenty of people across Manchester are going to be struggling to heat their homes this year. If we can turn something that was heading for landfill into a cheap, locally-made, sustainable fuel source for anyone with a wood burner, that feels like exactly the sort of everyday, practical difference we want to be making. We're hoping to sell the briquettes locally too, with proceeds going straight back into funding the project, keeping it self-sustaining.

The best bit about coffee briquettes, honestly

Making briquettes is basically making giant mud pies, and there is something deeply, unreasonably satisfying about squelching wet paper pulp through your fingers that never, ever gets old. We're fully grown adults who run a community composting project and we still fight over whose turn it is to do the pressing.

Squishing soaked shredded paper and coffee grounds with a briquette press

It's also become a proper hands-on skill for our Community Payback volunteers. We're showing them that stuff other people throw away can become something useful, valuable, and needed. That's a working condition and a skill that travels well beyond our site, whatever people go on to do next.

If you've got shredded paper piling up and nowhere for it to go, or you fancy a briquette or two for your own fire this winter, give us a shout. We'll be over here, up to our elbows in pulp, having the time of our lives.