[bdalgaard]

I just heard a story on NPR about a startup in Boston called Purpose Energy turning waste water from a brewery (Magic Hat brewing) and turning it into usable energy (methane). There are other efforts to use brewing waste more environmentally/economically in permaculture [1], but this is the first I'd heard of them using it to create energy.

Here is the full story.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-14/massachusetts-pushes-b...

The company is only a small part of the story on clean energy startups and the company doesn't just work with breweries, so it is only slightly related to the original question. Still, it sounds like this is a big problem for breweries to deal with and there is some innovation happening around it.

[1] http://plantchicago.org/

[jmspring]

The idea of fermentation to kill bugs and what not is mentioned in the documentary How Beer Saved the World.

If I remember rightly, they make a brew out of pond water towards the end

https://vimeo.com/23278902

[spoonie]

The only part of that documentary I don't like is that they purposely don't mention that they boil the pond water while brewing with it (like you would normal water when brewing). It would have been way cooler if they had shown that yeast alone was enough to kill off other bad organisms.