(Courtesy Epic Cleantec ? Devils Canyon Brewing)
With worldwide water shortages on the rise, Bill and his Ex funded a start-up that put 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 in 2023 a sponsorship funded by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and his ex-wife’s foundation, yielded results that are now 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, an environmental water infrastructure company to spur development into water reuse and conservation.
In 2023, Epic 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 at the time that the process is comparable to the biology that takes place in the human stomach. And it worked.
The water goes through an advanced multi-step purification process, including microfiltration and UV disinfection. And test found that this treated water was actually cleaner than the natural reservoir water typically used by local municipalities.
“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.”
At the time Federal and State laws in the US prohibited Epic and Devil’s Canyon from selling OneWater beer commercially. However, after changing regulations and a wave of massive consumer demand, accelerated by regional droughts, Epic Cleantec has now debuted a full-scale commercial release that includes including an approachable IPA, alongside its signature Kölsch.
But Epic OneWater wasn’t the first beer brewed with recycled wastewater.
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 that’s actually 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 continues to become economically scalable, the beer biz is looking at a massive paradigm shift in water usage, particularly the water used in brewing.
###
Want more Great Moments In Brewing?
We’ve got ‘em.
Guinness Brewery Named “World’s Leading Tourist Attraction”
BrewDog’s “F**k You CO2” Billboards Banned
