Engineer Brews A Lovely Wheat Beer With Milwaukee Wastewater
It scored a 7 out of 10 from a renowned local brewery’s taste test. And nobody’s died from it (yet).
Theera Ratarasarn, a wastewater engineer in Milwaukee, is one of the last people you’d expect to bring his work home with him. But he’s actually managed to combine his work with his hobby – homebrewing – to create a wastewater beer he’s named “Activated Sludge Wheat Ale.”
Beer is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages in the world, dating back to the Middle Ages. A commonly repeated factoid claims that beer was drunk because, as a boiled and fermented beverage, it was inhospitable for unfriendly bacteria and thus safer to drink than water (though some dispute that claim; it’s also possible that beer was simply a calorie-rich liquid to carry around). Regardless, the process of making beer leaves it safe almost by default.
Ratarasarn, though, didn’t leave that to chance. He “chlorinated, dechlorinated, filtered, distilled, tested and added nutrients to the water before beginning to make 5 gallons of Activated Sludge, a wheat ale with 5.15 percent alcohol by volume,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Interestingly, he chose to make a wheat beer due to that variety’s light color – a darker beer, like a porter or stout, was rejected because Ratarasarn thought the opaque hue might remind drinkers of raw sewage.
This isn’t really a project that can be done by anyone; Ratarasarn is, after all, established in the world of wastewater. But his aim was to show how clean wastewater really is, even urban wastewater. The effluent isn’t classified as drinkable in the U.S., but it’s certainly not raw sewage.
Activated Sludge Wheat Ale, though still just a homebrew project, is intriguing enough to have secured a professional tasting with testers from Lakefront Brewery, a renowned local craft brewer. The tasters praised Activated Sludge, which Ratarasarn has cheekily branded with a radiation symbol on its label, giving it a 7 out of 10 for flavor.
Read more about Activated Sludge over at the Journal Sentinel.
Image of a wheat beer (not Activated Sludge) via Flickr user Nicola
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
February 24, 2015
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.