TIL: There Is Beer Made Of Piss (And It's Called Pisner)

Image from: commons.wikimedia.org - Author, Paul Joseph - License

Yes, you almost got it right in the title, there is a brewery that makes beer fertilized by human urine! There is a very extended article on munchies.vice.com covering the topic, so here is how it goes:

The "beercycling" or "from piss to pilsner" project started back in 2015, when the Danish Agriculture & Food Council in collaboration with Nørrebro Bryghus pub & brewery collected donations from drunk and drugged(?) attendants of the Roskilde Festival near Copenhagen. And by donations, I don't mean money but... pee. The idea was to use the urine as fertilizer, which is not so gross, if you come to think that farmers do that all the time with animal poop (when my father bred rabbits, some 20 years ago, he would spread their smelly little poop-balls all over our garden; I assure you the tomatoes and cucumbers the next summer were absolutely tasty!).

Danish farmers are among the world-top professionals of the field and the Council cares a lot about sustainability. It would be a shame to leave such a product go to waste. So, 54.000 litres of all kind of urine shades was collected and in 2016 it was applied over crops that gave 11 tons of malting barley.

When the brewery received the produce, they tested the malt to define its quality and it turned out that it was pretty good. After mixing it up with various other ingredients and low temperature fermentation the beer was ready. And if you're curious about what it looks and tastes like:

The Pisner is slightly bitter, but surprisingly fresh. It smells hoppy and definitely not like ammonia—not even a hint of urinal. If there's any aspect of it that resembles urine, it's all in the color: dark golden and unfiltered, just like your first piss of the morning.

...numerous things have been added, such as the hops varieties polaris, from Germany, and simcoe, from the United States. When combined, the two give the final brew a citrus and pine-like aroma. [source]

Image from: pixabay.com

Well, beercycling sounds fun, but why use urine as fertilizer?

Well, fertilizers are used in order to enrich the soil and provide the plants with all the necessary nutrients and chemical elements. In order to make up for nutrient deficiencies farmers use chemical or natural fertilizers or even other plants. Substances like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are necessary for the normal and healthy plant growth. Since chemical fertilizers are expensive and their misuse can do more harm than good (polluting the environment), it is always safer to turn to natural ways of "nutrient-boosting". I am not here to terrorize you on the use of chemicals, it's not the chemicals themselves that do the damage, but extensive and careless use people make of them.

One type of natural fertilizer is manure, animal droppings that bring organic matter, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and other nutrients to the soil. Even here, safety measures need to be taken, because phosphorus may contaminate surface waters for example.

Now, as far as pee is concerned, our kidneys filter the nutrients the body cannot make use of and disposes them of through urine. Our pee contains nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, which as mentioned above are what most fertilizers have. According to goveganic.com the nutrients in one adult's urine suffice to fertilize 50-100% of the crops they will need to feed from. If you add the less dumping in the sewage system argument, peeing in your garden does not sound such a bad idea. High nitrogen levels may lead to eutrophication (he! another greek word!) in water ecosystems where sewage waters end up, even after filtering processes. This means that algae and aquatic plants overpopulations take the oxygen needed for the marine animals and fish to live. The alternative of using pee on land is actually pretty good. Pee fertilizers are also more effective, since it is easier for them to get absorbed and remain in the soil for longer.

Image from: pixabay.com

Are you telling me to quit doing it in my toilet and start releasing my inner world in the garden?

Kind of. Just make sure people aren't watching 'cause that'd be awkward (and imagine your neighbor's face when you'd tell them that the tomatoes you gave them the other day had a piss... oops, I meant a piece of you).

Am I going to get sick?

A paper from the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (Department of Parasitology, Mycology and Environmental Microbiology) concluded that if you do it right, you won't get sick. Urine in the bladder is sterile. On its way out it picks up some bacteria, more if there is a UTI present at the time, but even though pathogens may be carried in a person's urine they are not proven to be able to survive outside the body. If it's not contaminated by feces, then urine is safe. Concerns of drug residues in urine do have a point, but on the levels of a single household that should not be a problem.

Sanitation precautions include storing the urine for several months at certain temperature and not consuming the final products unless it's been a month since the last application. The ammonium that is formed from the urea raises the pH levels and works perfectly in inactivating microorganisms, making the urine safe for use after storing it properly.

An experiment at the University of Kuopio (Finland) showed that urine does affect productivity by increasing it. They tested tomato plants with mineral fertilizers, urine and a mixture of urine and birch ash. The urine-ash fertilizer gave bigger and richer in magnesium tomatoes. The taste, according to the 20 testers that took part, was equally good.

Should I start bottling it?

Well, if you want you could, but separating toilets that collect urine would also be helpful. The hard part is that they are not much wide-spread... yet. To find out more on how to use your urine as fertilizer, check out a couple of websites like healthy-vegetable-gardening.com and rodalesorganiclife.com.

Image from: commons.wikimedia.org - Author, GracinhaMarco Abundo - License