A clean water startup is making an interesting bet on beer. What’s interesting is that this beer is made from recycled shower and laundry water.
San Francisco-based Epic Cleantec was founded in 2015 as a wastewater recycling company that uses proprietary technology to purify and reuse water in office and apartment buildings.
“We need to overhaul our flash and forget about society,” CEO Aaron Tartakovsky said at the time.
Now he’s taking it to the next level.
“A lot of it was about psychology,” he says. “People are becoming accustomed to the concept of recycled water, and we’ve found that when you tell people this water is clean, they may or may not trust you. But when you take that very same recycled water molecule and put it in a beautiful beer can, all of a sudden, people love it.”
For beer, Epic’s system collects water from showers and laundry facilities and processes it through several treatment steps, including filters, biological treatment, membrane filtration, granular activated carbon, reverse osmosis, and disinfection, the company said.
The resulting clean water is transported to Devils Canyon Brewing Company, where beer is made.
These beers are available for online ordering in California, Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Kentucky, Vermont, New Hampshire, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Alaska, and Washington, D.C., and in retail stores in California.
It takes about 10 gallons of water to make one gallon of beer, so using recycled water has a big impact on water supplies. Epic’s IPAs are made using drought-resistant and energy-efficient hops, grains, and yeast, highlighting the environmental impact from grain to glass.
But again, it’s not about the beer.
“Buildings use about 15 percent of all freshwater on the planet,” Tartakovsky said. “We need to do things differently. That means we need to tell different stories. We need to engage people differently.”
Jordan Langer, CEO of events company Non Plus Ultra, was an original investor in Epic when it was just building. Now he serves beer at events.
“I was a little skeptical. I don’t believe in gimmicks,” Lander explained. “But I was wrong. It exploded like crazy. It put a lot of spotlight on Epic Cleantech and it became really, very, very interesting.”
Epic Cleantec is backed by three family offices, as well as J-Ventures, J-Impact and Echo River Capital. Total funding to date is $25 million.
Epic currently offers two beers: Shower Hour IPA and Laundry Club Kölsch. Tartakovsky said the company is also considering producing non-alcoholic beer.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
