A brewery is making beer with recycled wastewater, purified using a process developed by NASA

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 152 points –
A brewery is making beer with recycled wastewater, purified using a process developed by NASA
businessinsider.com

A brewery is making beer with recycled wastewater, purified using a process developed by NASA::The company relies on the same recycling methods that NASA uses to allow astronauts to drink water in space.

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Coors has been doing this for years.

Coors never consulted with NASA though. They developed their own proprietary process which uses far fewer steps.

I drank this for a weekend recently and it had so much water in it I had no hangover. Would recommend to be honest

It's like the old Monty Python joke. American beer is like making love in a canoe... It's fucking close to water.

Oh Oh, Omg, who wants to make the Budweiser joke? I mean it will need a little modification but COME ON!!

Canoes, close to water etc.....

I mean the technology has been around. There was talks about using it for California, but people would rather suffer through a drought than use purified wastewater.

Some towns do use it, they just don't make it a big deal to their residents how they are getting their water.

The vast, vast, vast majority of Americans drink recycled wastewater today. The wastewater treatment plants dump their effluent into the river upstream from where the drinking water is sourced.

By doing this, legally the drinking water source is the river and the idiots who don't understand how water treatment get to drink their own purified urine without being told they are.

The problem is that it would be significantly more efficient to skip the step of putting it into the river, since American (and most other developed nations) wastewater effluent is usually significantly cleaner than the river it is being discharged into.

Yeah, but there are cases where wastewater goes directly to treatment plants.

Yes, but my point still stands. Most Americans are drinking recycled wastewater.

Oh cool! I definitely think it's something that ought be adopted at a larger scale.

I live in Sweden, one of the countries with the most freshwater per capita in the world, and even so, for the past ten years or so we've had frequent droughts. There's not enough snowfall or rain to replenish our groundwater supply. Such is the world we made, and now we'd best adapt.

As per my other comment you probably already are. With the exception of costal communities nearly all wastewater is recycled.

In countries with poor wastewater standards this leads to massive river pollution. You don't know about it because Sweden has strong wastewater regulations.

I also used to be heavily critical of NASA, but as it turns out, their innovations for space travel have had some nice unintended side effects for life here on the 3rd rock from the sun.

but why

Breweries use a fuck ton of water, doing this would cut down on the strain on the municipality and possibly offer them a tax break.

Hey I am all for it. The alcohol from the beer would kill off any remaining bacteria anyway. I would definitely give this a shot, especially if it were an IPA.

It's not the alcohol of the beer which kill the remaining bacteria and co, but the high temperature during the brewing process.