The Conversation
Wait, They’re Using WHAT to Brew Beer Now?!
Amanda DiGiondomenico
Amanda DiGiondomenico
Amanda is a freelance writer and graphic designer who blogs about living a stylishly nerdy life at The Spendicate. A lifelong resident of Baltimore, MD, Amanda is an art school dropout, who managed to earn a masters degree in nonfiction writing. On the weekends, she's an expert guacamole maker, a novice jogger and an intermediate yogini.
If you’re a lover of craft brews or if you’ve even tried your hand at brewing beer at home, you might be delighted (or disgusted) to find out that there’s a way for beer to help save the planet. In fact, Clean Water Services, a wastewater treatment facility, made this their personal mission when they decided to partner up with local home brewers a couple of years ago. That’s right, a wastewater treatment facility.
The idea is to get people past their preconceived notions of sewage and to start treating wastewater like the valuable resource it is. Before you call this crazy and refuse to take anything we say seriously ever again, consider this: Clean Water Services produces some of the cleanest water around. After going through ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, disinfections and advanced oxidation, it’s definitely cleaner than whatever is coming out of your tap. (picture via Andrew Redington/Getty)
Are you on board now? Good. Art Larrance, a fixture in Oregon’s craft brew scene, suggested that the organization should host a brewing competition. In this competition, though, the brewers would have to draw their water from the Tualatin Rover, directly behind the wastewater treatment plant. The brewers found out that this ultra-purified water has no taste, like distilled water, which actually makes it perfect for brewing. When the water has a blank taste, the brewers have a blank slate to tweak until they find the exact flavor they need.
With plans to launch another competition in the near future, the hope is that enough people will get past the idea that sewage is always gross and start seeing wastewater as a resource to help combat droughts and water shortages. And who knows? We might even have a new craft beer trend on our hands. (picture via Mark Kolbe/Getty)
Would you drink wastewater beer? Let us know in the comments!
(h/t via Huffington Post, Fast Company, OPB, feature picture via Jason Kempin/Getty)
Amanda DiGiondomenico
Amanda is a freelance writer and graphic designer who blogs about living a stylishly nerdy life at The Spendicate. A lifelong resident of Baltimore, MD, Amanda is an art school dropout, who managed to earn a masters degree in nonfiction writing. On the weekends, she's an expert guacamole maker, a novice jogger and an intermediate yogini.