Special ingredient in San Francisco company's beer? Recycled water

A San Francisco company's beer has a special ingredient you likely wouldn't expect: recycled water from showers, sinks and washing machines.

The water that goes into the cans of Epic Cleantec's Epic OneWater Brew comes from inside a luxury San Francisco high-rise apartment building.

"We kind of live in this flush-and-forget society where we don't think about how we flush our toilets and water just magically appears," Epic Cleantec CEO Aaron Tartakovsky said. "We wanted to sort of showcase the potential of water reuse. We decided to highlight the unbelievable potential of recycled water by putting it into a beer."

The company partnered with Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company in San Carlos to brew the Kolsch-style ale.

"We had the first reaction as one would think: it's kind of a yuck factor," Kenzie Carpenter with Devil's Canyon Brewing Company said.

But then the brewing company tested the recycled water and was pleasantly surprised.

"It actually turned out that the water's cleaner than what we get from our reservoirs, the Hetch Hetchy," Carpenter said.

How exactly does Epic Cleantec purify the so-called greywater washed down sinks and drains?

"We're using these advanced treatment processes, the same kind of used by the astronauts where we are treating the water with multiple steps using biological treatment," Tartakovsky said. "We're actually using nature to clean the water. Then we put it through membranes."

The company recently received accolades from Time Magazine. Its beer was named one of the best inventions of the year.