Everything Old is New Again--to Some

You have to love millennials. Especially when they think they've discovered something new. They want to tell the world via social media, not realizing that there is very little that's actually "new." Click the links that follow to bring yourself up to speed.

My daughter-in-law-to-be, well aware of my affinity for beer, sent me this link on FaceBook the other day about a beer "made with pee," and asked if I would try this concoction called "Pisner." Despite the misleading headline, I already knew about this technique, and actually did a column on it fifteen years ago. Its humor was quite well received, if I may say so.

The technique is called "leinting" or "lanting," and it involves fertilizing the soil used for growing wheat with urine. That's quite removed from "making beer with pee." But so far, the FaceBook link has had over four million views, and the comments range from the disgusted to the predictable comparisons to "canoe" beers, a term familiar only to those who have been "immersed in the craft beer scene since 1996" (which happens to be my logo/motto).

Modesty be damned, I thought there was some exceptional writing in that old piece. Like this:

"It’s not that urine and beer are mutually exclusive. People have linked urine and beer for millennia. There’s a reason all the big beer festivals rent all those porta-potties, folks, and it ain’t because beer drinkers need a place to smoke. Is there a beer drinker among us who has never heard the maxim about “renting a beer?” And more than one brew (now, now, no names, please) has been evaluated in appearance and flavor by using the vulgar term for urine. So it’s not like the terms are never used in the same sentence."

And I certainly didn't know at the time that the last word of my second sentence would become a descriptor for a generation. Apparently these "Pisner" fellows had the gumption--and the cash-- to put this old idea into a new business model. But their effort does give rise to a new question: what's next?

As my closing comments stated a decade and a half ago, "Let’s see now, what’s this next old brewing term? Cremaining?" I'm just dying to sample that one.

Cheers!

The PubScout