Your local craft brewery might have a range of beers made with creative ingredients, like small-batch coffee, native botanicals, or even steeped pizza crusts. But unless you’re in Singapore, it’ll be difficult to find this one: a blonde ale brewed with recycled sewage water.
Singaporean brewery Brewerkz worked with the country’s Public Utilities Board (PUB) to produce the unique pour. PUB has been investigating ways to reduce water waste for quite some time, beginning with a study on sewage water sterilization in the 70s. By 1998, PUB had found a way to treat, reclaim, and produce sewage water for reuse without sacrificing affordability or public health. The sterilized water—called NEWater—was first introduced to raw water reservoirs, from which it would eventually make its way into the general water supply. Now, however, NEWater is sold for direct consumption in plastic water bottles.
Brewerkz started using this newer, drinkable iteration of NEWater to brew “NEWBrew” in 2018. The tropical blonde ale just began hitting supermarket shelves in April, where it’s expected to sell out by July thanks to a surprising level of demand. In fact, the brew has already sold out at Brewerkz locations.
NEWBrew isn’t just a novelty beverage: it’s also intended to raise awareness for water conservation. From California to Sydney, Australia, areas experiencing water shortages have begun to test and even
embrace the idea of reintroducing treated sewage water into the general supply. With each sale of bottled NEWater or a canned NEWBrew, Brewerkz and PUB hope to remind consumers to use water mindfully.
The average brewery goes through seven gallons of water for every gallon of beer, which creates the perfect environment in which to test strategies like PUB’s. But as one can imagine, NEWater must endure a stringent filtration and sanitization process before it makes its way to Brewerkz. Sewage water first goes through microfiltration, which separates out microscopic particles and bacteria. Then it undergoes reverse osmosis (a common, scalable filtration method) that uses a semi-permeable membrane to allow water molecules through while holding viruses and other “undesirables” behind. While these two steps alone might be sufficient to create a potable product, PUB sanitizes the filtered water using ultraviolet light before sending it off to Brewerkz and bottling facilities.
“NEWBrew is a showcase of the high quality of Newater and is proof that sustainability can be delicious,” said Tan Wee Han, owner and CEO of Brewerkz, during a media tasting in Tanah Merah.
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