The video above tells the whole story.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is it fair to stop drinking Tsingtao beer in response to this incident?
After all, it’s (probably) just one batch of beer. Knowing China, that guy is probably several items in a wet market by now. Is it fair to punish a whole company for the act of one jerk?
My answer: no, but never mind: I won’t order that beer again, and it used to be my favorite at Thai and Chinese restaurants. Who know how many times this has happened? I don’t want to be thinking about drinking urine on the rare occasions that I indulge in having a beer: my experience watching seniors in Russia drink their own pee as a “health drink” was disturbing enough.
Besides, after the Wuhan virus disaster, the more Chinese products I can boycott, the happier I’ll be.
Ethics Alarms 
Maybe that was the secret ingredient. 😜
I am not a beer drinker but if I was and had one offered to me I probably would not worry about it being contaminated. However, if a choice was offered, I don’t think I would choose this one to try.
Holding a business responsible for the idiotic acts of an employee would severely limit our choices. I see no ethical reason to hold the firm in contempt.
1. How about the whole country?
2. Heck, those piss-sipping pensioners in Russia seemed healthy enough!
We have childproof everythings because some idiot/maniac tampered with Tylenol bottles and poisoned consumers. Barn door fallacy and social overreaction but it still causes consumers a ton of grief trying to open those stupid caps. Isn’t this the same thing?
I suspect any contamination was boiled our of the wort during the cooking and fermentation stages.
jvb
I believe he’s in a barley tank that is in the sprouting before malting stage. All the liquid will be drained, the contents roasted, and then used to make beer.
The main reason beer exists is to drink the waste products of organisms that feed on the released sugars of the malting process anyway… And it’s essential the process sterilizes this malt.
I have slightly more reservations about where this beard has been: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Beard_Beer
I’ll just leave this here: https://www.indy100.com/viral/amouranth-yeast-beer-company
It is not so much an issue of this specific incident as much as if this is allowed to happen, then what else is allowed to happen that we do not see?
Will this change the taste of the beer? Most beer tastes like piss already!
Joking aside, urine is sterile, there will be high temperatures needed for the brewing process that would kill anything to be concerned with, and the dilution factor is insane. There is no real concern. But the psychological factor is strong. I wouldn’t drink it, but I wouldn’t drink any beer. See above joke.
Most bread mold won’t hurt you either, but after one store I frequented kept selling moldy bread, I stopped shopping there…..
Personally, I do not drink beer even after being stationed in Belgium and Germany.
I am an avid oenophile. so this incident does not affect me. That said I am reminded of a book from the seventies entitled “Eating May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” The author annotated the many parts of rat feces, ant wings, and other foreign matter, that are acceptable in products such as peanut butter, jam, and canned fruit.
Indeed, this is partially a sausage-making problem, and redolent of the conversation between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction” about eating pork.
Maybe all beer-makers have such loose security and badly vetted employees that piss periodically ends up an an ingredient in the beer-brewing process. But absent evidence of that, I have less reason to trust a product made by a company with proven beer-pissers than I do with beer made by a company not yet so exposed. Ergo, the rational decision is to choose the more trust-worthy brewer.