Brewery creates beer from recycled Urine

A Danish brewery is using 50,000 litres of urine collected from the largest music festival in Northern Europe to produce a novelty beer aimed at the more adventurous drinker.

The beer named “Pisner” – a word-play combining pilsner with local slang for urine – contains no human waste, but is produced from fields of malting barley fertilized with human urine rather than traditional animal manure or factory-made plant nutrients.

“The reason why we make this “Pisner” beer is because we are a craft brewery out of Copenhagen and about four years ago we converted into organic, so all our beers are organic today. We thought it would be a great idea also to go into recyclable beer. So we want to test our brewers and test our opportunities to make recyclable beer, so yes, that’s why,” said Henrik Vang,  the chief executive of brewer Norrebro Bryghus.

Using human waste as fertilizer on such a scale is a novelty, said Denmark’s Agriculture and Food Council, which came up with the idea for what could be the ultimate sustainable hipster beer and has already named the concept “beercycling”.

“It tastes really good. It’s fresh and full at the same time and it’s a good beer,” said one beer taster, Birden Eldahl.

The 50,000 litres collected from that festival resulted in enough malting barley to brew around 60,000 bottles of Pisner beer.