Roskilde attendees’ urine turned into beer

In 2015, Roskilde Festival, Denmark’s largest music festival, launched the latest of its many eco-friendly initiatives. ‘From piss to Pilsner’ aimed to collect 25,000 litres of urine from festivalgoers that could be recycled (‘beercycled’) from a pale yellow liquid into another, more desirable, pale yellow liquid: a refreshing fizzy lager.

Now, two years later, the plan has borne fruit, with a Danish microbrewery making use of double that – 50,000l, or 10,000 gallons – to brew a beer it’s dubbed (what else?) Pisner.

Aimed at the “more adventurous drinker”, Pisner contains no urine but is produced from barley grown in fields fertilised with human waste. “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,” says Henrik Vang, chief executive of the brewery, Norrebro Bryghus.

“If it had tasted even a bit like urine I would put it down, but you don’t even notice”

Around 60,000 bottles of Pisner can be brewed using the urine collected at Roskilde 2015, says Norrebro Bryghus.

In addition to being eco-friendly, it’s apparently very good: “It’s fresh and full at the same time, and it’s a good beer,” one taster, Birden Eldahl, tells Reuters.

“If it had tasted even a bit like urine, I would put it down,” adds Roskilde 2015 attendee Anders Sjögren, “but you don’t even notice.”

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