Beer made from recycled wastewater passes taste test
By Peter Fimrite, San Francisco Chronicle
It was a tough call, but Hugo Von Meijenfeldt thought he detected a hint of astronaut wastewater in the beer that he had just gulped.
The consul general for the Netherlands — who, as representative of the second-largest exporter of beer in the world, purports to know his way around a brewery — declared with some authority that the robust brew he had just tasted was the one made out of recycled wastewater supplied by NASA.
He was wrong.
“I liked the one that was less hoppy, which I thought was not the recycled beer,” said Von Meijenfeldt, one of two people on a five-judge panel at the Meeting of the Minds sustainability convention taste test in Richmond who couldn’t tell one potation from the other.
The blind tasting was an attempt by Maverick’s Brewing Co., an affiliate of Half Moon Bay Brewing Co., to bring attention to the importance of using wastewater as a resource and combat what water officials call the “yuck factor.”
Well, Coors will just jump on that one.