And you thought your lousy beer tasted like urine.
Copenhagen, Denmark’s Nørrebro Bryghus will soon sell “Pisner” beer made from the waste collected at Denmark’s Roskilde Music Festival, according to Food and Wine magazine.
These industrious Danes used urine from the 2015 festival to fertilize the barley used for this year’s brew. From that harvest, they yielded 50,000 bottles of Pisner. It’ll soon be for sale at stores around Denmark.
At the time, Roskilde’s event planners partnered with the Danish Agriculture & Food Council in the hopes of gathering more than 6,600 gallons of pee for recycling purposes. The council said the organic waste from the festival was wreaking havoc on the area’s sewage system.
“Beercycling,” as they called it, would really take things full circle. Plus, with backstage urinals set up at the festival — where Paul McCartney and Pharrell Williams performed — maybe the council would “collect some rock star pee as well,” the DAFC’s Marie Grabow Westergaard told the Guardian at the time.
California breweries have recently given the technique a whirl, making their own liquid gold from San Diego’s urine supply. Breweries such as Stone and Ballast Point used water from Pure Water San Diego, a $3 billion program working to make one-third of the city’s water come from recycling sewage and waste water by 2021. Unlike the sewage issue in Denmark, the region’s drought necessitated these desperate measures.
One brave Reuters reporter, Julie Astrid Thomson, says the Nørrebro Bryghus Pisner is actually pretty good — “nothing like urine at all” — which is more than we can say for some beer here.