This beer is made with recycled shower water in California

Water scarcity is becoming a growing problem, so much so that several companies are looking for options to use recycled water in different activities or even to develop beers.

A water recycling company in California took used water utilization to an extreme and developed a beer made from wastewater that the company says tastes as good as or better than traditional beers.

Epic OneWater Brew, by Epic Cleantec and Devil's Canyon Brewing Company, is brewed from recycled greywater from showers, laundry, and sinks in a 40-story San Francisco apartment building, where Epic has the equipment to capture, treat and reuse water for non-drinking purposes.

Epic has openly called it a “demo product” - the company's goal is to get people talking about the possibilities of water recycling, and current trade regulations on recycled drinking water are strict.

“We wanted to do something fun that would be an engaging tool to talk to people, to get them excited, but also to show the untapped potential of water reuse,” Aaron Tartakovsky, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, told The Guardian.

Our class @cee_stanford toured the first building scale #waterreuse facility in SF! These systems reduce 95% of a building’s water use (and they can make cool products like beer)

Cheers to @EpicCleantec for working to break the stigma on #sustainable #waterreuse! pic.twitter.com/f0DdAlpfxN

— Akshay Rao (@raodoesresearch) April 25, 2023

Flavor

According to the Guardian reporter, who was able to test the product, the taste of the beer is pleasant and the drink is crisp and drinkable. In addition, he pointed out that there were no shower or laundry notes and that if she was served in a bar, he would never guess where she came from.

In the future, they expect many companies to make similar drinking products and sell them, but not yet. The brewers say turning gray water into drinkable water is no problem, technologically speaking, but they say the real challenge is making sure they're in sync with regulatory bodies.