A beer can does not look like water infrastructure. That is its advantage. The cans Aaron Tartakovsky began handing out in 2022 carried a line almost engineered to make a drinker pause: made with purified recycled water. The source was a 40-story apartment building in San Francisco, where showers, washing machines, and bathroom sinks supplied greywater to an Epic Cleantec treatment system in the basement. After additional purification and independent testing, some of that water went to Devil's Canyon Brewing Company and emerged as a crisp Kölsch. The drink was a demonstration, not yet a product. Its real job was to turn an invisible system into a conversation.
Tartakovsky had discovered that the hardest part of recycled water was not always chemistry. Modern treatment can be measured, tested, and monitored. The more stubborn obstacle sits between the ears. People remember where water has been and recoil, even when its present quality is documented. Put the same water into a familiar, well-designed can, though, and apprehension can become curiosity. A utility problem acquires a taste, a label, and a story someone might repeat.
“We judge water by its quality, not its history.”Aaron Tartakovsky
By 2025, the experiment had become a commercial line: Shower Hour IPA and Laundry Club Kölsch. Epic secured a special variance from San Francisco, added treatment steps and third-party testing, and launched the beers at Greenbuild. In 2026, Tartakovsky said more than 23,000 cans had moved through more than 100 retail locations. At large events, the unconventional cans sometimes outsold names with global distribution. The small water company had not wandered away from its mission. It had built a public demonstration that people would pay to participate in.
Make the building do more
Epic Cleantec's actual product lives far from the beverage aisle. Its systems sit inside buildings and collect water that would otherwise leave through the sewer. Depending on the project, the input can include greywater, blackwater, rainwater, stormwater, or condensate. The output returns to jobs that do not need drinking-quality water: flushing toilets, irrigating landscaping, feeding cooling towers, or washing clothes. Epic says a configured system can reuse up to 95 percent of a building's wastewater.
The practical insight is almost embarrassingly simple. Cities spend money and energy moving clean water long distances, then buildings use a portion of it for tasks that never required potable water. A toilet does not care whether its next flush began in a shower upstairs. A cooling tower does not have a memory. Onsite reuse narrows the trip, reduces demand on the potable supply, and cuts the volume sent to centralized treatment.
At Fifteen Fifty, the San Francisco apartment tower that became Epic's first commissioned high-rise project, the system was designed to recycle 7,500 gallons a day - roughly 2.5 million gallons a year. The machinery occupies a mechanical room. The effect reaches beyond the property line: less demand on a regional supply and less flow into the sewer network. A building becomes a modest but active node in the city's water system.
There can be more in the pipe than water. Epic's broader resource-recovery pitch includes capturing heat from warm wastewater to preheat incoming water, reducing part of a building's hot-water energy demand. Organic solids can become a carbon-rich soil product. What conventionally appears on an owner's ledger as a disposal problem starts to look like an inventory of water, energy, and nutrients.
Politics, engineering, then water
Tartakovsky did not arrive through the usual route. He earned degrees at Tufts University and Tel Aviv University, worked in federal politics, and stayed involved in public policy. He later became director of business development and marketing at CB Engineers, a building-systems engineering firm, where he formed an R&D division. The sequence gave him a view across institutions and mechanical systems before he became a water founder.
Epic's origin also began outside conventional wastewater practice. Tartakovsky has explained that his two co-founders worked on advanced toilets for a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sanitation challenge. The assignment focused on the billions of people without clean water and reliable sanitation. It also prompted a closer look at wealthy cities. Their infrastructure might be extensive, but the default logic still treated water as a one-pass resource.
In 2015, Aaron co-founded Epic with his father, engineer Igor Tartakovsky. Their lack of a traditional water-industry pedigree was, in Aaron's telling, useful early on. They were not trained to accept every inherited boundary. That did not remove the need for engineering discipline. It helped them ask why a technology familiar in municipal plants could not become smaller, modular, and integrated into real estate.
“None of us come from the water and wastewater world. Frankly, I think that's part of our secret sauce.”Aaron Tartakovsky on the founding team's perspective
The analogy Tartakovsky uses is solar power. Electricity once appeared almost entirely as a centralized service delivered from a large plant. Rooftop solar did not eliminate the grid; it added distributed production. Epic's thesis is similar in shape. Onsite treatment does not abolish municipal utilities. It reduces strain and gives individual buildings another way to manage risk.
That last word - permitted - explains why Tartakovsky's political background belongs in the story. Water is regulated for good reason. A technically capable machine cannot install itself, earn approval, reassure officials, or fit a developer's financing schedule. Epic built a full-service model around those frictions: design, engineering, permitting, construction support, and ongoing operations. In this business, paperwork and monitoring are components of the product.
The coalition around the machine
San Francisco gave the model an unusually strong proving ground. Its onsite water-reuse rules evolved from incentives into requirements for qualifying large new developments. The policy created demand, but it also created a proving process. Fifteen Fifty became the city's first approved greywater reuse system of its kind. That milestone required a working alignment among the owner, engineers, operators, and public agencies.
Tartakovsky tends to describe regulation as an enabling layer when it is built intelligently. Epic works with policymakers and regulators while selling to real-estate owners. That position is less glamorous than a breakthrough membrane and more consequential than it sounds. Every city has its codes; every project has a water balance, a construction calendar, and someone accountable for operations. Scaling means translating the same core idea through many local systems.
The company has gradually widened that map. Announced projects have included a first onsite greywater system for a Honolulu residential high-rise, a blackwater system at San Diego's Campus at Horton, and installations tied to hotels and offices. In November 2024, Epic announced a $12 million Series B to expand operations and product development. The financing followed years in which the company and its OneWater system collected recognition from TIME, Fast Company, and water-industry groups.
Recognition gave Tartakovsky more stages on which to make the argument. He spoke at Davos, the United Nations Water Conference, Fast Company's Innovation Festival, and SXSW. Epic joined a White House roundtable on national water security in 2024. These appearances are connected by a recurring claim: a water system is simultaneously technology, policy, business model, and public behavior.
A useful operating principle: in regulated infrastructure, the customer is not the only audience. The inspector, operator, architect, lender, tenant, and local utility all need a version of the story that survives contact with their responsibilities.
The story is part of the system
Tartakovsky's most revealing line about the beer is that he never expected to enter that business. He has always, he says, been interested in stories. The distinction matters. Epic did not invent recycled-water beer, and a few thousand cans do not resolve urban scarcity. The cans perform another kind of work: they let a person rehearse a future in which water's prior use is less important than its tested quality.
The first Kölsch was selected partly because it was approachable. The treated water could be tuned into a neutral base for the brewer. Early skeptics often changed their response after tasting it. A CBS host drank a full can on morning television. The Guardian's reporter found it crisp and ordinary. CNN carried the demonstration to an international audience. Each encounter moved the subject away from an acronym on an engineering diagram and toward an experience.
Then Epic did the less visible work required to turn demonstration into commerce. The company navigated a variance, treatment requirements, lab verification, production, branding, and distribution. The commercial beers arrived in late 2025. A limited-edition whiskey, proofed with purified recycled water for SXSW, extended the same premise. The products were playful. The process behind them was not casual.
“We're not a beer company. We're a water technology company that has found in beer a really amazing vehicle to tell the water story.”Aaron Tartakovsky, 2026
There is a founder's lesson inside the can. When a system is hidden, explanation has limits. People need an object, an image, or a ritual that gives the unfamiliar somewhere to land. The best public education is not necessarily another report. Sometimes it is the moment a skeptical person takes a sip and discovers that the feared difference has no taste.
A city made of small utilities
Tartakovsky's ambition is larger than a catalog of treatment equipment. He wants onsite reuse to become ordinary in buildings and cities. That requires systems that are modular enough for real projects, operators who can keep them reliable, rules that protect people without freezing innovation, and economics that give owners a reason to act before a crisis.
The urgency arrives from several directions. Water and sewer rates rise. Aging infrastructure demands investment. Drought stresses supplies in some regions, while storms overwhelm networks in others. New loads, including data centers, sharpen questions about who gets water and on what terms. A building that can capture rain, reuse wastewater, and manage some of its own demand is not independent of the city. It is better prepared to cooperate with it.
The physical transformation happens below stairs and behind access doors. The cultural transformation happens in public: on a panel, across a permitting desk, during a building tour, or over a cold can with an improbable origin. Tartakovsky's career sits in that gap. He is not trying to make wastewater glamorous. He is trying to make a second use feel sensible.
Look at a skyline after hearing his pitch and the silhouette changes. Each tower is still an office, hotel, or home. It is also a collection surface, a reservoir of warm water, a treatment opportunity, and a possible partner to the grid beneath the street. The future Tartakovsky describes is not a single monumental plant. It is thousands of ordinary buildings learning to loop.