California university and craft brewery team up to collect urine for science

Hypothetically, if you needed to collect a lot of pee, where is the first place you would turn? The answer, obviously is a craft brewery. The better question is: Why do you want to collect a lot of pee?

Well, I can’t answer for you weirdos, but the Urine Recovery Research Group at the University of California, Davis campus (who smartly goes by URRG), wants it for legit science reasons. Urine is filled with potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen, so the URRG wants to be the first group of heroes to figure out how to separate those elements from the grosser other pee stuff so that we can start harvesting urine for fertilizer.

Anyway, the URRG, using UC Davis’ connections in the brewing world, is setting up shop at Sudwerk Brewery.

From Fox 40:

“We could extract a valuable fertilizer product, and it could be used for developing a local source of fertilizer for local agriculture systems,” UC Davis researcher Harold Leverenz said. Leverenz says the hope is that, one day, this technology could be used to help third-world countries who don’t have steady access to farming necessities.

“The thing with fertilizers is a lot of developing countries don’t have local sources of fertilizer,” he told FOX40.

But before URRG can get their grant money, they need to prove their technology works, which means they need lots and lots of samples.

Pretty cool, really. Sounds like extra incentive for anyone around town to head to Sudwerk and start drinking. You know, for science. Anyway, we thank all parties involved for giving us a reason to make pee jokes.