“Lips that touch wine shall never touch mine.” So goes a poem from long ago advocating temperance. But what about lips that have touched recycled toilet water?
That’s the chief ingredient in NewBrew, a beer introduced at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan last week. The potion, made in Singapore, became available for purchase in stores there in April. The Singaporean delegation brought along samples to hand out to delegates from other nations.
So what was the overall reaction? It was surprisingly positive, with some individuals asking for seconds.
Although the thought of drinking a chemically treated distillate of waste water is repulsive to many, it amounts to a matter of survival in Singapore, which, the New York Times notes, “has no major natural freshwater sources of its own. It collects rainfall, imports water from its northern neighbor, Malaysia, removes salt from seawater, and uses filtration systems and ultraviolet light to make wastewater drinkable again.”
“I’ll admit it’s a bit of a gimmick, but these things do work,” Ong Tze-Ch’in,chief executive of Singapore’s national water agency, is quoted as saying in an interview.
