California company turns recycled shower, sink water into beer

Aug. 1 (UPI) -- A California company parlayed its water recycling expertise into the creation of a beer made from a San Francisco residential building's wastewater.

Epic Cleantec, a San Francisco-based water treatment company, teamed with Devil's Canyon Brewing Co. to create Epic OneWater Brew, a Kölsch-style ale made using recycled water from showers, sinks and washing machines in Fifteen Fifty, a 40-story luxury apartment building.

"Buildings globally use 14% of all potable water," Aaron Tartakovsky, CEO and co-founder of Epic Cleantec, told CNN. "Almost no buildings reuse that water -- that's what we're trying to change."

The beer is not currently for sale due to regulations banning recycled wastewater from being used in commercial beverages, but it proved to be a big hit at a conference on sustainable building technologies.

"We ended up producing just over 7,000 cans, not as a commercial product, but as an educational effort," Tartakovsky said. "It was meant to tell the water reuse story in a new way. But frankly, we did not anticipate the tremendous response that we saw."

Tartakovsky said the company is now in talks with other breweries around the world.

"We have a lot of people who are asking for more of it, just because beyond being an interesting environmental story, the beer actually just tastes really good," he said.