If you were stranded on a desert island and only had one type of beer to drink, would you drink it? What if that beer was made from urine and named Pisner? Would you go stone cold thirsty and sober, or submit yourself to the Pisner?
What if you weren’t on a desert island and had seemingly limitless beer choices?
These are all valid questions, and ones that can be answered (well, at least the last one) by your willingness to try Pisner from the Danish brewery Norrebro Bryghus.
Norrebro Bryghus recently released their Pisner pilsner. It’s made using barley that was fertilized with 50,000 liters of pee from the 130,000 attendees of the Roskilde Music Festival in 2015. Denmark’s Agriculture and Food Council originally came up with the idea and called it “beercycling,” because what goes in must come out. Now what went in and came out can go right back in again.
“When the news that we had started brewing the Pisner came out, a lot of people thought we were filtering the urine to put it directly in the beer and we had a good laugh about that,” Henrik Vang, the lead brewer at Norrebro Bryghus, told Reuters.
It’s a hell of a way reduce, reuse, recycle. This is sustainability at it’s finest — turning human waste into delicious beer. Many Americans are still busy trying to figure out which trash can to put cardboard in.
“About four years ago we converted into organic so all our beers are organic today, and we thought it would be a great idea also to go into recycled beer,” Vang told IBT.
Sustainability is the future, and sustainable beer means turning waste into drinks.
So it’s time to reconsider: Would you drink piss beer?
