World Water Day

Today, March 22, is World Water Day, when the world is asked to focus on the issues that a lack of clean water poses to our society. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide don’t have access to clean water, and that lack of water is a serious cause of disease and economic hardship.

So today we were discussing: How Much Water Is Required to Make Beer?

We thought that we may use 50 gallons of water to make 5 gallons of beer. Most of the water is used for cleaning and sterilizing all the equipment. But this does not count the water used to make the ingredients.

According to this graph from the Economist article "Thirsty work" 300 liters of water are required to make 1 liter of beer (or 1,500 gallons of water to make 5 gallons of beer). But that pales (pun intended) in comparison to the the water requirements of wine (3X) or coffee (4X).



Another interesting graphic from the GOOD blog article "Transparency: How Much Water Do You Use?" shows direct and indirect use of water for common daily activities.

The most disturbing part of the image above is the suggestion to save 35 gallons of water by not taking a bath. ick.