Danish brewery achieves its dream of making beer with recycled urine

In a chilling example of what happens when you tell kids to follow their dreams no matter what, Grubstreet reports that Danish brewery Norrebro Bryghus has realized its environmentally friendly, yet decidedly unappetizing, ambition of brewing beer using human urine. It’s not as bad as it sounds, really—the urine is not a primary ingredient in the beer, but instead was used to fertilize the fields of malting barley that were later used to brew Norrebro Bryghus’ new “Pisner.”

Thus, the beer tastes less like urine than your average can of Milwaukee’s Best Ice, with one taste tester telling Reuters, “If it had tasted even a bit like urine, I would put it down, but you don’t even notice.” (Well sure, if it’s cold enough…) As we reported back in 2015, the urine was collected from more than 100,000 people at the outdoor music festival Roskilde, so it was probably half beer anyway. The final product, a limited run of 60,000 bottles, is being referred to as “beercycling,” a catchy portmanteau one can only hope will fail to catch on amongst the home-brewing community.


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