After rain comes beer

Currently, the anthropogenic climate change challenges people to be creative. On the one hand we experience long periods of drought. On the other, cluster showers demand new ways to store water temporarily, so that the city drains are relieved and the city does not flood.

When we talked about this at our symposium on Water and the City last year, Ralph Lasage from the Amsterdam Water Academy told us he wants to have a blue-green polder roof on the newest building of the Vrije Universiteit.

On such a roof, rainwater is stored and used to water the plants growing on it. At the symposium, we discussed if we could use the water for anything else. Rainwater seems such an excellent example for turning waste into a resource. But we were not the first. Amsterdam Brewery De Prael has recently issued its third type of Rainbeer. This beer is made from rain water harvested from roofs of Amsterdam buildings. The inventor of Rainbeer is Joris Hoebe, filmmaker and a specialist at making creative concepts for the circular economy.

Can we expect the production of VU-beer in the near future? Ralph has already a name: Griffin Beer!