Festival goers’ urine helps create ‘pisner’ beer

Festival goers answer the call of nature
Festival goers answer the call of nature

Danish brewery Norrebro Bryghus have produced a beer with the help of 54,000 litres of urine collected at the 2015 Roskilde music festival.

The new product is called Pisner – but contains no human waste. Instead, the urine was used to fertilise the barley for the beer, rather than use more traditional methods – and it’s called Beercycling.

CEO at the Danish Agriculture and Food Council Karen Hækkerup tells Visit Copenhagen: “Just as we have seen shops sell goods that would otherwise have been thrown out, Beercycling allows us to recycle a product that is normally flushed down the drain.

“When it comes to circular economy, Danish farmers are some of the best in the world. If you can brew a beer with urine as fertiliser, you can recycle almost anything.”

Norrebro Bryghus chief executive Henrik Vang adds: “We want to be a part of the Beercycling project partly due to the story it has already told, but also because it is interesting to partake in a project, which addresses the challenges of sustainability and circular economy. Basically, it is a cool project.”

The urine collected resulted in enough barley to produce 60,000 bottles of beer and the pisner will be available to buy next month.

Scott Munro
Louder e-commerce editor

Scott has spent more than 30 years in newspapers, magazines and online as an editor, production editor, sub-editor, designer, writer and reviewer. Scott joined our news desk in the summer of 2014 before moving to the e-commerce team in 2020. Scott maintains Louder’s buyer’s guides, scouts out the best deals for music fans and reviews headphones, speakers, books and more. He's written more than 11,000 articles across Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog and has previous written for publications including IGN, the Sunday Mirror, Daily Record and The Herald, covering everything from daily news and weekly features, to video games, travel and whisky. Scott's favourite bands are Fields Of The Nephilim, The Cure, New Model Army, All About Eve, The Mission, Cocteau Twins, Drab Majesty, Marillion and Rush.