Danish brewery creates beer from urine

You’ve heard of the pilsner, but now, say hello to the Pisner, a new beer that has been recycled and created with the help of — you guessed it — urine. The drink has been made by Danish brewer Norrebro Bryghus, and required about 50,000 litres of urine for its generation.

Of course, getting your hand on thousands of litres of pee exclusively to create beer is a tough ask. So, the brewers specially collected it two years ago at the staging of the Roskilde Festival in Denmark.

However, the Pisner doesn’t contain any actual human waste. The urine collected from the music festival was used to fertilise the malted barley that was eventually used as an ingredient for the beer.

Says the brewery’s chief executive, Henrik Vang, “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.”

The brewers called the concept of producing this novelty drink ‘beercycling’ and had the backing of the country’s Agriculture and Food Council.