As strange as it sounds, the next time you relieve yourself at a music festival, your urine might be used to make beer, giving a whole new meaning to being “on the piss”.
As The Guardian reports, Denmark’s Roskilde Festival has implemented a urine-to-beer “beercycling” system called From Piss To Pilsener to help alleviate the effects of festival waste on local environments.
Here’s how the magic happened:
Over 100,000 festival-goers have used specially appointed bathrooms at the festival, which have their own storage tanks.
The blokes did their number ones in troughs — remember: number twos aren’t allowed in this process — while the ladies were given those weird “shewee” funnel thingies to help them aim onto a target.
The collected urine is then used to fertilise malting barley in nearby fields, which is used to brew the beer. What’s more, festival organisers were even going to try to get acts like Florence and the Machine, Pharrell Williams and Sir Paul McCartney to give their ‘contributions’ to the initiative.
As Marie Grabow Westergaard from the Danish Agriculture & Food Council (DAFC) explains, “We’ve got urinals right next to the stages where the acts will play, so we’re hoping to collect some rock star pee as well.”
Leif Nielsen from the DAFC says the project is about changing how we think of festival waste.
“The huge amount of urine produced at festivals was having a negative impact on the environment and the sewage system, but beercycling will turn the urine into a resource,” Nielsen says.
“I think most people can see the reason and the fun behind making a personal contribution to beer brewing, and the fact that rock music is involved will help us get our message across.”
If the program goes smoothly, festival-goers at Roskilde 2017 might get to taste a home brew of a different kind, and festival videos like the one below might just be too hard to watch.
Elsewhere in the crazy world of Roskilde, Blur frontman Damon Albarn was forcibly removed from the stage by security after he refused to end his five-hour set. Not even for a bathroom break!
Watch: Dumb & Dumber Urine Beer Scene
