Bill Gates Funds Breakthrough Wastewater Beer Effort

With worldwide water shortages on the rise, Bill and his Ex are funding a start-up that is putting a whole new spin on the ‘shower beer’ concept.

Here’s the deal…

We’ve reported on beers made with recycled wastewater in the past, but now a sponsorship funded by Bill Gates, (the founder of Microsoft) and his ex-wife’s foundation, has yielded results that might ignite a drinks industry revolution potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Back in 2012 the Bill and Melissa Gates Charitable Foundation gave a grant to a start-up company called Epic Cleantec, as part of a “Reinvent the Toilet” challenge to spur development into water reuse and conservation.

Eleven years later, according to CNBC, Epic has produced a test beer, Epic OneWater Brew, a Kölsch-Style Ale that was brewed in partnership with Devil’s Canyon Brewing using water  from a 40-story San Francisco apartment complex that was recycled through a series of ultrafiltration membranes , each about .001% of the diameter of a human hair.

Co-founder Aaron Tartakovsky told CNBC this process is comparable with the biology that takes place in the human stomach. And seemingly it works….

“Water is omnipresent in all our lives. It grows the food we eat, we use it to bathe, cook and clean…and yet we know so little about how water works, how it gets into our taps and where the wastewater goes. We are trying to amplify the water story to tell it in a different way, and we are using the medium of beer to tell that story.”

Current Federal and State laws in the US prohibit Epic and Devil’s Canyon from selling the beer commercially. But, as the Drinks Business reports, “they have been giving away samples to test public reaction to the technology – and so far it has been positive.”

In 2017 Stone Brewing made headlines in the US with a “green” beer made with reclaimed sewage water.

And in 2018 Stockholm’s Nya Carnegiebryggeriet (a Carlsberg brewing facility operated by Brooklyn Brewery), and the Swedish Environmental Research Institute debuted a beer they developed together brewed with recycled waste water.

But if Epic Cleantec’s technology proves to be economically scalable, the beer biz is looking at an ‘epic’ paradigm shift in water usage, particularly the water used in brewing.

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