A new beer, the ‘Pisner’, was made with human urine collected from a music festival
Bottoms up?
A Danish microbrewery is making a novelty brew from malting barley fertilized with human urine collected at a music festival.
The brewery combined the word “pilsner” with slang for pee to name the strange brew “Pisner.”
“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,” Henrik Vang, chief executive of brewer Norrebro Bryghus, told Reuters.
“About four years ago we converted into organic so all our beers are organic today, and we thought it would be a great idea also to go into recycled beer.”
Two years ago the brewery collected 50,000 liters – roughly 13,200 gallons – of human urine from the Roskilde Music Festival, the largest music festival in northern Europe. It was used instead of animal manure or manmade fertilizer to feed the barley fields.
Danish agriculture officials call the novel process “beercycling.”
“The huge amount of urine produced at festivals was having a negative impact on the environment and the sewage system,” Leif Nielsen of Denmark’s Agriculture and Food Council told the media in 2015. “But beercycling will turn the urine into a resource.”
The new beer is making quite a buzz.
“It’s a hell of a way to reduce, reuse, recycle,” writes Nick Hines, who covers quaffing for the website VinePair. “This is sustainability at its finest — turning human waste into delicious beer. Many Americans are still busy trying to figure out which trash can to put cardboard in.”
The New York Daily News reports the beer will be sold at stores across Denmark and at this year’s Roskilde festival in late June.
Festival performers, including Nas, the Foo Fighters, Solange, The Weeknd, Lorde and others will be able to order a pint before they perform.
And what will they taste if they do? Not what you’d expect.
“If it had tasted even a bit like urine, I would put it down, but you don’t even notice,” festival-goer and “Pisner” fan Anders Sjögren told Reuters.
This story was originally published May 11, 2017 at 1:47 PM with the headline "A new beer, the ‘Pisner’, was made with human urine collected from a music festival."