Weird beers are nothing new, in fact, I’ve reported on several boundary pushing beers before, including one reportedly made from vaginal yeast and many containing animal testicles. But now, one Danish brewery has released a Pilsner that incorporates recycled urine into the brew.
Now there is a technicality here that may change the way you feel about the urine component. The Norrebro Bryghus microbrewery used 50,000 liters of urine collected at the Roskilde Music Festival in 2015 to fertilize fields of malting barley. So while urine wasn’t purified and used directly in the beer making process, it was still used in the production of the barley.
This Pilsner, cheekily called ‘Pisner’ was a collaborative project with the brewery and the Danish Food and Agricultural Council. They’ve coined the term ‘Beercycling’ for the process which has produced around 60,000 bottles of Pilsner. Now the reality is, the barley fields would have likely been fertilized with either animal manure or man-made chemicals, so is recycled urine all that different?
Apparently the experiment hasn’t impacted the taste of the beer, so will we see more of this in the future? Could be a sustainable, recycled source of fertilizer. Drink beer–> piss beer–> fertilize said beer with piss–> repeat.
Ale/Sessions 