What started out as a charitable and sustainable mission to help farmers in rural countries has taken a little turn for the unexpected. Sustainability is good and all, but is this a little too far? Get ready to be slightly grossed out but very amazed, because researchers have invented a sustainable way to brew beer from human pee using the sun’s powerful rays.
This all started when researchers Sebastiaan Derese and Arne Verliefde from Ghent University wanted to help developing countries acquire resources for farming in a sustainable way. In an interview with Munchies, Professor Verliefde said that a year’s worth of human urine in these countries could possibly fertilize about 300 pounds of corn. This doesn’t seem like much, considering how much corn our country consumes, but it’s still food that can feed people and natural resources that can be saved at the same time.
After successfully building a machine that extracts nutrients and water from urine, the team decided to conduct a side experiment by brewing beer. At the Ghent Music Festival in Belgium, they collected thousands of liters of urine and used their solar-powered device to extract drinkable water which they will now use for the brewing process.
In addition, people at the music festival actually got the opportunity to taste sustainable beer that the team had already brewed using purified water from a wastewater plant. To no surprise, people were hesitant at first, but a lot of people ended up trying it, according to the professor. It is the beer-loving country of Belgium after all.
We won’t know whether or not you’ll get to have the chance to taste some of this sustainable beer brewed from the festival until the end of the year. But if all goes well with the process and inspections, you might be seeing the Sewer to Brewer logo in your grocery stores real soon.