Epic OneWater Beer made from recycled shower water.

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Globally, buildings use 14% of  drinking water  to wash clothes and flush toilets and do not recycle that water. Contaminated water can be treated to remove contaminants, so recycled wastewater can be useful for several purposes. Treated wastewater can be reused in many ways, such as laundry, agriculture, toilet flushing, construction sites, etc.

Water can also be purified to a high level that meets or exceeds federal drinking water quality standards . This recycled water is safe to drink and often cleaner than many water sources we regularly use. However, people are hesitant to drink this highly treated potable wastewater.

To overcome public misgivings and promote wastewater use, San Francisco-based startup Epic Cleantec, with its brewing partners at Devil's Canyon Brewing Co., has created Epic OneWater Brew. It is a Kölsch-style beer brewed with recycled water from the showers, sinks and washing machines of Fifteen Fifty, a 40-story residential building.

Epic Cleantec is a water recycling tec  Special Data  hnology company that provides wastewater treatment and recycling systems  that eliminate the need to send wastewater into a sewer for transport to a remote treatment facility.



Fifteen Fifty is a 40-story luxury high-rise apartment building in San Francisco with a graywater reuse system designed to recycle 7,500 gallons daily or 2.75 million gallons annually. This greywater, collected primarily from laundry and showers, is treated to exceptional standards and reused for toilet and urine in the building.

The collected greywater is stored in a pre-filtration and equalization tank that buffers the flow, reducing the size of the downstream system. The raw water then undergoes biological treatment to eliminate biological oxygen demand (BOD). The water is then rigorously filtered through a membrane with a nominal pore diameter of 0.04 microns.

This water then goes through several stages of disinfection with ultraviolet light and chlorine, making the water safe for reuse in non-potable applications.

If heat recovery is included, the system will extract energy from wastewater and use it to preheat domestic hot water, reducing building heating costs.

According to the company, the system recycles up to 95% of wastewater, including black water from toilets or gray water from sinks, washing machines, bathtubs and showers.

In September 2022,  Epic Cleantec  shipped more than 2,000 gallons of recycled water to Devils Canyon Brewing Co. and began its transformation into beer within two weeks. By the end of the following month, the brewing process was complete. Epic beer was canned commercially and labeled with the silhouette of the Fifteen Fifty building.

Epic OneWater Brew is safe to drink. However, you cannot buy beer, as regulations prohibit the use of recycled wastewater in commercial beverages.