Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery Fancy a cold one? Would it change your mind if that frothy, frosty beer was brewed using treated wastewater? Town Brewing in Charlotte, NC sure hopes not, because that's the schtick behind its latest creation: Renew Brew, which is being created using water treated at the city's McDowell Wastewater Treatment Plant. According …
I don't think so, no?
Tap water is treated reservoir water, which is supposed to be rainwater
Treated sewage (and in 'exceptional' cases that are slowly becoming the norm) is allowed to flow into rivers, but NOT reservoirs, afaik. There would be too much microplastics and the aforementioned pharmaceutical chemicals in it, even after treatment.
This is apparently planned to change by 2030, but is unpopular for obvious reasons: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62708413
Yeah, good point. I was kind of going with the old saying that all the water you drink from a London tap has been through 8 people's kidneys before you drink it. Probably a lot more now, as that was decades ago. Anyway, I guess that's not the same as taking water directly from sewage treatment plants. I guess it's way way more diluted for a start. Why would anyone want that? Ewwww. I'll pass.
Strange to blame this on climate change when California is growing barn loads of alfalfa and shipping it to feed cows in Saudi Arabia (according to one of the latest Freakonomics Radio episodes). I guess they should sort that out before putting treated sewage water back into the drinking water system. Growing almonds is a problem too IIRC.
Oh and on a side note, UNTREATED sewage is allowed to flow into a stream which runs right past my house. Supposed to be for "emergency overflow use only" which is like every ten years, but it happens several times a year in the 20+ years I've lived here, and they keep doing it. Sometimes when it hasn't even rained for weeks.
California is the largest alfalfa producing state in the US. We grow in excess of half a million acres of the stuff. The saudis are only responsible for 14,000 acres, or about 2.8% of that. That is far less than a drop in the bucket when compared to California's total use of agricultural water. "Sorting that out" wont affect drinking water supplies at all. And during the meanwhile, the idiot saudis spend way over market rates on tools and supplies here, to say nothing of providing a paycheck to a lot of people in an otherwise depressed area of the state, thus bringing lots of lovely dollars back into the US.
Yes, the almond crop uses boatloads of water that could be better spent elsewhere. To say nothing of cotton and rice.
It's all a fine balancing act between water and interstate/international commerce.
All joking aside, a German-style lager (such as Budweiser) is quite difficult to brew. Not a lot of room to hide off flavo(u)rs such as fusels, esters, aldehydes, tannins & other bits & pieces of the chemical soup that makes up typical fermented beverages.
Unless you're talking about Budweiser Budvar, Bud is not a German-style lager. Aside from _literally_ tasting like horse piss (boy, I'm never doing that taste challenge again), it uses rice in its production, which no German beer I'm aware of uses. There are great American micro-breweries, but all the big label beers are revolting. Not being chippy, but I don't want people to get the wrong idea about German beers, which are Wunderbar ;)
Bud has a bad effect on me, but luckily my (former) local kept a stock of bottled Budvar... until AB leant on the suppliers to enforce their 'trademark' and they could no longer supply Budvar to pubs that had Bud/Bud Light as their main beer.
Yes, 'former'...
Good point. You'd probably want to test each batch of water with a mass-spectrometer, to test for anything that can't simply be filtered out or eaten by microbes which are then filtered out. But even then, i'd guess there are some poisons that could still be harmful even when below the noise floor of the instrument.
TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater.
"TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater."
Unfortunately, in hotter climates, letting it evaporate and turn into rainwater is essentially exporting their water. The rain isn't happening often enough there. Which is pretty much the point of the article :-)
I doubt it. Those dumbasses are apparently too stupid to realize that the smoke is a waste of fuel, and visible proof that the owner doesn't have a clue about how to tune a diesel engine to make power. In other words, smoke belching street trucks are all (that's ALL) 'orribly underpowered because their owners WANT them to be low on power.
Please feel free to join me in pointing out the cretins and laughing at them.
Ale is a type of beer. Beer is a fermented grain product. I could make a case for bread being a type of beer.
Ale is brewed warm. with a top fermenting yeast. It used to be bittered/preserved with a gruit (look it up if you care), but these days most ales make use of hops.
I've played around with ancient "gruit ale" recipes. I think I'll stick to hops.
Couldn't produce enough grain to make that much beer
Water was freely available and kept clean, plus small beer gave you wings
Seriously, there are more historical references (as in actual medival - or even earlier - texts of the time, not just random websites) for drinking water than for "medievals all drank ale/small beer for safety"
You're welcome.
It wasn't just British peasants -it was all classes. Wells and streams were polluted by variious microbes in excrement. Wine was even more effective. Whiskey, gin, and such were most effective. It appears from production records that most American adults were tipsy most of the day in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"However, there's always that amusing myth about medieval British peasants drinking beer because the water wasn't safe to drink."
William Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (1821) explains in detail the making of beer (ale sans hops.) As I recall the water has to be brought to boiling to extract the malt from matter barley to produce the wort which would also have destroyed most pathogens found in the water. The yeast (barm) is added to the cooled liquid.
From Cobbett's description of "small" beer I would guess it wasn't particularly alcoholic. Records of servants' rather generous daily allowances of small beer dating from the middle ages to his time would lead to the same conclusion.
Before industrialization and urbanization beer was routinely brewed in the great houses and humbler cottage and consumed by all classes and ages.
By the 1820s Cobbett was railing against against the decline of this cottage economy. Very much not keen on tea drinking at least amongst the labouring classes. Of course tea requires boiling water but I think Cobbett was against the extra time required each time of to boil the water, prepare the tea and clean up - he might also have had an inkling of the toxic adulterants added to tea at the time [see Mayhew's writings.]
I don't know about outside the UK. The german states would have had their beer statutes I suppose. Wine would have usually been diluted with water before consumption so unless the wine had disinfectant properties (unfortunately a Iot of wine tastes like it does :) the risk of drinking contaminated water remained.
Normally consumed chilled, warm australian beer tastes like it was drawn straight from the pub's urinal - disgusting!
In water, Bacteria.
Making beer involves boiling the water, so it has historically been a good way of dealing with water contaminated by organics.
See also John Snow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak
Though hopefully, anything coming out of a full treatment works is fully potable water, anyway. (Hopefully).
In water, Bacteria.Making beer involves boiling the water, so it has historically been a good way of dealing with water contaminated by organics.
Yup, long used throughout history as a way to preserve water, or just make it safer to drink. So small beer or weak wines. Also using waste water's long been a joke around pretty much any brewery. We used to have Green King IPA on the pump clips in the urinals of my first local. Their brewery apparently had it's own aquifers, but was next door to a coal power station. Or it was just Ipswich Port Authority. Being a grain docks, it used to reek to high heaven from grains and flour that had ended up in the dock. Or this was just the first stage of Green King's brewing process.
American Lager anyway...
OK, time for my favorite Coors joke:
Back in the day when you couldn't get Coors (Banquet; this was before the time of that awful swill smugly referred to as Coors Light) outside of a 500 mile radius of Denver, an enterprising gent wanted to find out what it was about Coors that made it so popular. So he took a sample of it and sent it off to a lab. After two weeks, he received a reply from that lab that opened thus:
Dear Sir,We're sorry to report that your horse has diabetes.
Prior art: a version of the joke shows up in Bill Mauldin's Up Front, from the campaign of North Africa.
I did once live about five miles from the Coors brewery, and get a whiff of the malt from time to time. Coors (and I am not talking about Coors Light) was not bad when the air temperature was over 90 F and the Coors was chilled until ice crystals just started to form.
> do people think that the fish get out to go to the toilet?
If they've got any sense, UK fish do, to escape the human sh't'n'p'ss. Our monopoly water companies treat rivers and lakes as free open sewers.
The accountants call them 'externalities' - zero cost. But we all pay an extremely heavy price.
Not sure if that's just a bit of snark in response to some of the jibes at Americans or a serious question, but anyway the answer is yes (drinkable water), in relation to freshwater streams.
Not so much the major rivers, but that applies to most major rivers worldwide, and in the UK, despite the recent obsession with sewage outfalls / discharges (which is as much about political point scoring as it is about environmental protection), the water quality in the rivers is better now than it has been for a couple of hundred years.
See for example:
https://www.zsl.org/what-we-do/projects/state-of-the-thames-2021
Or just read up about the 'great stink' and the construction of the Bazalgette sewer system (including about the collision between the 'Princess Alice' and the 'Bywell Castle', though not just after you've eaten).
So UK rivers - still room for improvement, but water quality is much better than it was, and is generally well protected.
"So UK rivers - still room for improvement, but water quality is much better than it was, and is generally well protected."
Although, unless you are at a "source", eg an underground spring making it's first exit into the open world, always remember that no matter how inviting and clear that stream water looks, there may be a dead sheep or something in it upstream, out of of sight! :-)
Don't they teach people about things like the water cycle any more at school? I learned about this when I was 8. For those that missed out -- all water's recycled. (They used to say that our tapwater in London had been through eight sets of kidneys on the way to our tap.)
Its part of the infection of American Ignorance that spreads like a stain over the planet -- and especially the UK which for some bizarre reason seems to like copying everything we do in the US. America is still very much the throwaway society -- there's always another tree to cut down or lake to drain, 'new' resources with anything 'used' just thrown away. So naturally recycling wastewater -- eeew!, the thought's horrible. We have to have our pure, spring water -- even if there's a dead animal in it upstream (just don't tell us....).
Forget about human kidneys.
More than likely every drop of water you drink is dinosaur urine -- dinosaurs were on this planet millions of years longer than humans have been or are, honestly, likely to be and there's probably not a molecule of water (exclusive of whatever small amount of cometary water may have landed here since thier extinction) that hasn't been processed through the urethra of at least one dinosaur.
Drink up.
there's probably not a molecule of water (exclusive of whatever small amount of cometary water may have landed here since thier extinction) that hasn't been processed through the urethra of at least one dinosaur
Which is why I prefer mine to be part of a barley-brewed spirit or, at a push, grain alcohol with juniper in it. With tonic.
even if there's a dead animal in it upstream (just don't tell us....)
There's a whole 'natural water' (also called 'raw water') movement in the US - people go to 'unspoilt' springs and rivers to drink the water or drink bottles of 'unprocessed' water from rivers and springs. A number of people died drinking water that supposedly came from a 'pure' spring when if fact it came from an aquifer thoroughly contaminated by animal carcasses and faeces.
Hint: There's a reason why drinking water have very stringent rules about what it can and cannot contain.
that taste of gnat piss on a good day.
Fun fact
If a brewery takes water from a river then there is a good chance that the water will have been used before they extract it from the river. That's why many breweries jealously guard their boreholes.
The same goes for drinking water.
Yes folks, if you are a Londoner, you could well be drinking Reading, Maidenhead and Slough's piss.
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Currently, recycled wastewater can cover up to 40% of Singapores water demand, with plans to increase this to 55% by 2060. By 2035, they plan to achieve significant water savings equivalent to 15 Olympic-sized swimming pools daily. To put that into perspective, the Tonga underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean in 2022 blasted enough water to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools into Earth’s stratosphere - enough to supply Singapore's recycled water demands for 10+ years.
How many beers/spirits around the world get their water from the municipal water system? Sure some are getting their water from a natural spring (or at least claim they do and maybe did when they had 1/100th of the volume) or their own well, but obviously many are getting ordinary city water like we get out of our taps. Even if your city doesn't put any of the treated water back into the system, but instead dumps it all into a convenient river, if you're getting ANY of your water from a pipe upstream of that outflow in the river you are getting some of the treated water from towns upstream of you.
Anyone who regularly has a beer, or a whiskey, or a coke, or bottled water stands a good chance of drinking sewer water. And honestly, you're generally better off with the heavily treated sewer water than lightly (or not at all) treated well water especially if you live in an area with a lot of agriculture. Farm runoff like animal waste may be filtered through the soil layers before reaching the well, but some pesticide and herbicide chemicals attach to the water molecules and come back up the well. It might take years or even decades to get there depending on how deep the well is, but it is just a matter of time.
It is difficult to do treat water to remove those chemicals. I live in a medium sized city but it is all midwest agriculture upstream. They built a new treatment plan 20 years ago to be able to properly deal with the water they were getting from the river since they couldn't supply the whole city from wells any longer, and the shallower wells were starting to see the same stuff that was coming down the river.
Even my dear old dad called it 'onion water', and he was polite in the extreme.
I thought most decent breweries, certainly in the UK, take their water from natural springs and therefore at least have the filtering effect of rain and rock to help purify. They then produce a decent 'ale' which can be drunk without having to worry about stomach bloating, dissolved hormones and excrement.
BTW, 'small beer' (actually a weak ale) was a staple drink for the working British population before the modern water supplies were filled with mind-altering chemicals.
... when it was safer to drink the beer than the water (even the small beer) - even when said beer was brewed with the water that was unsafe to drink. Turns out that yeast waste is fairly good at killing bugs!
(And most of the brewing was done by women - the alewife was the woman responsible for making sure that there was enough beer for the household/street/village so that they didn't all die of dysentry or cholera.)
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