Brewing beer uses a lot of water: from the irrigation needed to grow barley and hops to the aqua that ends up in the bottle. American brewers use an average of seven gallons of water to make one gallon of beer. This has pushed craft breweries to think about how they can reduce their water footprint to be more sustainable. One solution a handful of breweries have experimented with is using treated wastewater to make beer. That’s right. We’re talking about water that was likely once in a toilet.
“It tastes exactly like their standard product. The only difference being instead of drawing from the tap, they took water from us,” says Christine O’Grady, a program coordinator with the University of Calgary’s Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets, which worked in partnership with Village Brewery and a water technology company called Xylem Inc. to produce the beer. Brewers say the largest barrier to more breweries using treated wastewater in their beer is that consumers are still grossed out by the idea. O’Grady calls this the “yuck factor.” She says people are grossed out by the idea of drinking reclaimed wastewater. “I think we’ve demonstrated very effectively that it’s clean and safe water, but people still have that mental hurdle to overcome,” she says.
As water security is becoming a growing problem across the world, particularly in landlocked countries, O’Grady hopes this batch of beer will help bring greater awareness about the fact this technology exists and that we can reuse water in many ways.
Source: Modern Farmer
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