Turning urine into beer. Yes, that's a thing now

[Jabberwocky]

Scientists in Belgium turned urine from festival goers into drinkable water for the purposes of making beer. But would you drink it?

The next time a friend says, "This beer tastes like piss," you might think twice about where it came from.

That's because scientists at a Belgian university have created a machine that turns urine into drinkable water and fertilizer.

A machine like this could bring drinkable water to rural areas of the world that don't have access to clean water, or could be installed in public places like airports, researcher Sebastiaan Derese told Reuters.

Or, it could be used to make beer. Bear Grylls would be so proud.

Here's how it works: The machine uses solar energy to heat urine that's been collected in a boiler. The urine is then put through a membrane that separates the water from nutrients like potassium, phosphorous and nitrogen.

The team, which has been working on the project for two and a half years, brought their magic pee machine to a music festival in Ghent, Belgium earlier in the month and ended up nabbing 1,000 liters of water from the festival attendees. That water will get turned into beer -- which is probably how a lot of it started out anyway.

This isn't the first time brave souls have tried to turn urine into beer. A 2015 music festival in Denmark used festival goers' urine to fertilize barley to make beer. In another instance, Clean Water Services in Oregon was pushing for a homebrew group to use recycled toilet water to make beer. San Francisco-based Half Moon Bay Brewing makes an IPA using gray water -- or water recycled from toilets, showers and sinks.

In any case, we hope the system is more sound than Kevin Costner's urine purification rig from "Waterworld."


Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/turning-urine-into-beer-yes-thats-a-thing-now/

 

[slimvictor]

I'm pretty sure that they have made Budweiser this way for many years.
Just without the filtering process

 

[strity1994]

I'm pretty sure that they have made Budweiser this way for many years.
Just without the filtering process

Lmao!!

 

[belligerent drunk]

Here's how it works: The machine uses solar energy to heat urine that's been collected in a boiler. The urine is then put through a membrane that separates the water from nutrients like potassium, phosphorous and nitrogen.

This is stupid. The process they use involves distillation of the water and reverse osmosis. This makes it a very energetically-costly way of purifying water. And it can be done with salt water too to make it drinkable - the reason it's not done often (people try to avoid doing that at all costs) is because it's just way too expensive.

This is neither new nor efficient.

 

[manboychef]

^^^indeed. If you are looking for more low tech :charcoal filtering would be less expensive and time consuming. This is just a parlor trick.

If a place cannot secure fresh water, chances are they do not have any sort of facilities capable of doing this type of process.

 

[belligerent drunk]

The purest water we use at the lab (MilliQ) goes through distillation, microfiltering/reverse osmosis, charcoal filtering, ion exchange, UV oxidation - and it's damn expensive. Even the simple "distilled water" goes through reverse osmosis as well, at least here, and it's definitely too expensive to use as regular tap/drinking water. But then again they're too pure for that purpose anyway.

Even simple distillation (which would probably be enough to have reasonably drinkable water) requires a lot of energy, because water's heat of vaporisation is very high, and there's no way around that. It's actually a big problem. If we could find a cheap way to make drinkable water from sea/ocean water, it'd be fan-fucking-tastic.

I don't know if this particular idea is a joke or not, but it seems rather silly if it's not a joke.