Earlier this year, a new beer appeared on the menu at Fox City Brewing Company in Forsyth, Georgia. Opened three years ago in a former ice house an hour south of Atlanta, Fox City serves pale ales, stouts and other microbrews. The new addition, called Revival Lager, stands apart from anything it’s made before — and from nearly every other beer on tap in the U.S. Fox City’s menu calls it a “light, crisp, eco-friendly lager made from highly repurposed and recycled water.” This is a delicate way of saying that it’s made from treated sewage.
“We flower up the verbiage a little bit, to make sure people try it,” says Chris Bump, the brewer at Fox City, sitting in the taproom on a Tuesday afternoon in March. When a waitress brings over two pints of Revival, Bump, a 35-year-old Georgia native with tattooed arms, a full beard and floppy baseball cap, raises a toast before we both take a sip. It is, as advertised, a refreshing, easy-drinking beer.
Bump did not wake up one morning and decide to try brewing a beer with recycled wastewater. The idea came to him via the Canadian water technology company H2O Innovation, which operates a sewage treatment plant in Forsyth and wanted a beer to serve at the annual symposium of the WaterReuse Association. Held this year in Atlanta, the event brings together hundreds of utility leaders, engineers and scientists to discuss the state-of-the-art in recycling water. A few hours after I shared a pint with Bump, cans of Revival would be served at a symposium party at the Georgia Aquarium, where self-professed “water nerds” mingled while manta rays and beluga whales swam behind glass walls.
