‘Bottoms up’: Charlotte beer made from recycled wastewater

CHARLOTTE, NC (WSOC) — It may look like your average beer, but it’s brewed with water pulled straight from a wastewater treatment plant!

It’s the first recycled water beer in the Carolinas. You can thank the residents of northwest Mecklenburg County for providing the wastewater that is being used for the newest beer at Town Brewing.

Experts say this water is clean, this process is the future and this beer is delicious.

It’s called Renew Brew. Town Brewing in Wesley Heights is partnering with Charlotte Water and the company Xylem to produce the first beer in the Carolinas using wastewater!

Charlotte Water processes 85 million gallons of it a day. But instead of returning it to the Catawba River, this water goes through extra purification and is tested for 150 contaminants. The company Xylem did the process.

“Normally, it just goes back to the creek and we go back into the lake system and down downstream, so we recapture it before it did that,” Chris Thompson with Xylem said. “And then we utilized it to brew beer, which is a really fun concept.”

Charlotte Water says the water is like any other H20 and this could be a solution for communities where it is scarce.

“It represents innovation, creativity, investment of infrastructure. It represents the hard work of staff,” said Charlotte Water Director Angela Charles.

And that hard work is paying off. They put Renew Brew in a blind taste test at the Queen City Brewers Festival. It won Best in Show

“It was just icing on the cake. And I think really proof in the pudding, if you will, that the beer was made from such clean water that showcased all of the product inside of that beer,” said Brandon Stirewalt with Town Brewing.

This is a demonstration product so it is not for sale. But the public can try it at Town Brewing’s 420 Festival next month.