Music Festival Recycles Urine into Beer

Usually it’s the other way around: lots of beer = lots of urine. But leave it to the crafty ecologically-conscious Danes to reverse that equation at the just-completed Roskilde Festival, the largest event of its kind in Northern Europe.  They called it “from piss to pilsner.” But it’s not exactly how it may sound.

Some 25,000 litres of pee were collected from the 100,000 people at the gig (including such performers as Paul McCartney and Florence + the Machine) by asking festival-goers to wiz in a trough that leads to a massive storage tank. The urine was then recycled (“beercycled”) by transporting it to a nearby field where it was used to fertilize malting barley. That barley will now be used to make more beer.  If everything goes the way it should, all the beer served at the 2017 Roskilde Festival will be made from that barley.

I know, I know. You’re probably wondering how women got involved. They were given free cardboard “urine directors” for use with the trough.

More at The Guardian.