As everyone knows, one of the main perks of being an astronaut is the opportunity to drink your own urine. We’ve all wistfully looked up at the stars and thought, “Man, they get their own pee up there! If only I was so lucky.” But fear not, young star explorer! Because even though few of us get to become astronauts (and even fewer of us are Bear Grylls!), a Danish brewery is making sure we don’t have to go to space or become dehydrated in the woods for that first sweet taste of human pee. We can just go to a bar!
Nørrebro Bryghus — a microbrewery in Copenhagen — has come out with a line of beer called the “Pisner” (because, of course) utilizing recycled human pee to make a beer that’s as tasty as it is environmentally friendly. Don’t worry, there’s no actual human urine in the beer. But they did collect 50,000 liters of human waste from urinals at a music festival and use it to fertilize the fields of barley that they grew to make it. Which seems fitting. Concert goers drink a boatload of beer and then when they’re done with it, that beer is turned around to make them even more beer. It’s the circle of life, and it moves us all.
“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,” said Henrik Vang, Chief Executive of the brewery told Reuters. The Denmark Agriculture and Food Council is also having fun with the concept calling the process, “beercycling.”
The urine collected from the one music festival grew enough barley to brew 60,000 bottles of the beer, so it’s actually a really effective use of water recycling. Although, while we at Uproxx are “pro anything that will reduce our water footprint,” maybe we don’t want to actually know that urine went into the production of our beer? It seems a little unnecessary, perhaps? Maybe, we’re overreacting though. As Patches O’Houlihan from Dodgeball would say, “Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway because it’s sterile and I like the taste.”
So for all of you out there for whom the urine is the draw, have at it folks. Urine beer looks like it may be here to stay. And from all accounts it’s pretty good. So urine for a good time (I mean were we supposed to NOT make that joke when it’s RIGHT THERE???).
