DRINKING in the bath is a luxury many of us wish we had more time to enjoy. But how about drinking FROM the bath?

A California company has started making a crisp and drinkable kölsch style beer – made from 100 per cent recycled bath water.

Epic Cleantec, a water-recycling firm, has teamed up with Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company to figure out how much can be done with what we already have after years of drought in the US state. 

Epic has set up home in a 40-storey San Francisco apartment block where they have onsite equipment to capture, clean and reuse greywater from sinks and bathrooms for non-drinking purposes.

Perhaps luckily though, you won’t find the beer on shelves any time soon. Epic has stated from the start that it is a “demonstration product”. The company’s goal is to open a conversation about recycled water. 

“We wanted to do something fun that was going to be an engaging tool to talk to people, to get them excited, but also that showcased the untapped potential of water reuse,” said Aaron Tartakovsky, Epic Cleantec’s co-founder and CEO in the Guardian.

He further added on their choice of kölsch style beer: “We wanted to choose a beer that was going to be sort of more universally liked versus some of the more craft beers, like an IPA, that some people like, some people don’t.”

But would this ever sell and how has the test brew gone down with drinkers?

There were no notes of leftover soap and thankfully it didn’t have a creamy head apparently. 

“It was pleasant, crisp and drinkable. If this were served at a bar, I’d never guess where it came from.” Matthew Cantor of the Guardian stated.

Do others approve? 

“I think a lot of people, initially and understandably, were skeptical about the project or were hesitant to try it, but I would say 99 per cent who came in feeling a little bit apprehensive, once they tried it, got really excited,” Epic CEO Tartakovsky said.

In fact there were even some distinct advantages 

“A lot of times at a brewery, you turn on the tap and whatever water you get, that’s what you brew with. In our case, we have so much control over the treatment process that we were actually able to tweak some of the steps to give the brewers a blank canvas.”

In the future Tartakovsky expects lots of companies to make similar products, but once again regulation needs to catch up with technology.

“We could do that next week, that’s not a problem at all, technologically speaking,” he said.

“The real challenge is just making sure that we are on the same page with the regulators. We want to make sure we’re always on the same page, because at the end of the day, their job is to protect public health.”

In the meantime companies like Epic are dealing with the issues in other ways. 

The company is running the first approved water recycling scheme in San Francisco where buildings erected after 1 January 2022 are required to install onsite water reuse systems.

“We’re going into these buildings, which globally use 14 per cent of all water, and almost none of them reuse that water. And we are helping these recycling projects reuse up to 95 per cent of their water,” Tartakovsky said.

“We’re in the 21st century, with all the technological capabilities that we have at our disposal. The fact that we are still reliant on whether or not it rains to know if we’ll have enough water for our communities is a problem.”