Brewery producing lager from human urine

A Danish beer company is making a new drink called Pisner with ingredients that are being fertilised from 50,000 litres of festival urine. Welcome to “Beercycling”.

In what’s surely targeted at the more adventurous drinker, a new beer is on the way that’s the first to be produced using urine. Called Pisner (a highly amusing splicing of Pilsner and the more common word for urine), it’s being made using 50,000 litres of bladder discharge collected at the 2015 Roskilde festival, the largest music festival in Northern Europe. They plan to make a total of 60,000 bottles.

It’s a joint collaboration between the Danish Food and Agriculture Council and the brewery and gastropub Nørrebro Bryghus. Clearly, urine isn’t being put into the drink itself – it’s being used to fertilise the field of malting barley instead of the traditional animal manure.

CEO of Norrebro Bryghus Henrik Vang explained: “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.”

Other new beer concepts of late have been the Betsy beer specifically made for in-flight high altitude consumption, and Rune and Sköll, two beers specifically designed to compliment whiskey. The big question is – would you be brave enough to sink a bottle of Pisner?