The internet of beer
IoT devices are transforming brewing, both in the professional breweries and the home. Jo Best gets a taste of what’s going on
Internet of Things devices are transforming the brewing process, both in the professional breweries and the home. Jo Best gets a taste of what’s going on.
Brewing is one of the oldest crafts in the world – the first beer recipes date from thousands of years BCE. But for beer makers, from home brewers to industrial producers, technology is an increasingly vital ingredient to making the perfect ale.
Brewing involves a handful of processes that haven’t changed for decades: malting, where the enzymes in grains such as barley are activated; mashing, where those grains get milled and soaked in hot water to break them down; filtering the grains from the liquid; boiling, where the liquid is heated up with additional flavourings; and the final stage, fermentation, where the beer takes on its individual flavour profile.
And the tech behind all that? That’s largely remain unchanged too.
However, as any beer lover will tell you, there has been a massive shift in brewing over the past couple of decades, with an explosion of craft breweries expanding the types, flavours and styles of beer that drinkers can enjoy. What made that change possible was a sea change in brewing technology, as beer tech firms started to think small.
The rise of the microbrewery
Once vendors began making cutdown versions of hardware that was traditionally the province of bigger operations, smaller-scale operators could acquire the equipment they needed to set up craft and microbreweries. “With the rise of small breweries in the last few decades, it’s not necessarily new technology, but scaling down of existing technology to sizes that make sense and work for smaller members,” said Chuck Skypeck, technical brewing projects manager at the Brewers Association.
Hardware for canning beer in a format that worked for smaller producers simply didn’t exist 15 to 20 years ago, he said. More recently, technology to remove carbon dioxide generated during beer fermentation is also becoming available to smaller brewers. The captured CO2 can then be reused to carbonate beer or put to work in other brewing processes.
However, it’s in the smallest of microbreweries – the back bedrooms and spare garage space of the home brewers – that technology is really taking grip. Home brewing used to involve a few buckets, an airing cupboard and, often, results that tasted like the contents of the drip trays at your local. But a new crop of automated machines are helping home brewers make deliciously drinkable ales.
Companies such as PicoBrew and Coopers’ BeerDroid have built devices and apps that allow home brewers to produce a batch of beer without the traditional equipment and funkytasting results. The original all-inone machine is the MiniBrew, created by a Dutch firm of the same name after raising almost £250,000 from an Indiegogo campaign and £6.8 million in venture capital funding. The company’s co-founder Bart van der Kooij began working on the machine after tasting the variable results of his home brew efforts. The first commercially available
MiniBrew machine launched in 2019 and the equivalent of 186,000 bottles of beer have been made with the machines since.
The MiniBrew takes the guesswork out of making beer at home. Beginner brewers can order “brew packs”, ready-made boxes of ingredients designed to make a particular recipe. The home brewer then mixes the
We believe that the beer brewing industry has been underserved by technology for too long
ingredients, scans the brew pack’s QR code into the MiniBrew app to give the machine its instructions on how to make the recipe, and the machine will carry out the mashing, brewing and fermentation. A few hours later, the beer is ready for fermentation to begin. A few weeks later, there’s a batch of beer, ready to drink.
While the MiniBrew handles much of the hard work, van der Kooij still wants to see users get involved in the brewing process. “I still believe beer is craftsmanship,” he said. “If you want to create it yourself, there should be a human touch in the process. If you completely rule that out, then it’s just like making coffee – push a button and you get it. That’s something that we don’t want to achieve.”
Once a homebrewer has built up a bit of experience, they can get into creating their own recipes, trying new combinations of ingredients and varying the work that the machine does. Once they have cracked a winning formula, they can then share their recipe with others on the MiniBrew platform.
The company is exploring using the same model to connect breweries with drinkers around the world: supplying recipes and brew packs for the beers normally found in bars and off licences, so users can make their favourite brews at home. “We believe that the beer brewing industry has been underserved by technology for too long,” explained van der Kooij. “We believe it can help you brew a better beer.”
While all-in-one machines are relatively rare due to the upfront costs, expect homebrewing to become more automated over time. “With respect to automation, the sky is, as ever, the limit,” said Dave Carpenter, editor-in-chief of Zymurgy, the journal for American Homebrewers Association members. “Temperature, whether of the mash or of fermentation, is probably the most widely automated process variable among homebrewers, but virtually anything can be automated today, either by purchasing a dedicated piece of equipment or by designing and building a custom gadget.”
The new brew
In recent years, breweries have begun turning to Internet of Things technologies to guarantee the taste and consistency of their beer. IoT tech can be used to measure and adjust factors that affect the crops that are used in beer – for example, monitoring the soil the crops are grown in to ensure the best quality ingredients. Once the ingredients are picked, they’re shipped to the brewing plant. When fresh hops are used, they have to be transported within set ranges of humidity and temperature to stop spoilage, and delivered within a matter of hours to make sure they reach the brewery in a usable condition. GPS tracking on transport vehicles lets brewers track the progress of their hops, while sensors can be used to ensure they’re travelling in optimum conditions.
IoT sensors can play a similar role during fermentation: devices have
been designed that can float in the beer wort as it ferments, with Bluetooth used to relay information on the temperature of the beer during the process. The data can then be inputted into brewing software that adjusts the temperature accordingly, to guarantee it stays within the boundaries needed to produce the drink’s flavour and aroma.
Using IoT doesn’t necessarily mean blowing the tech budget, either: some brewers have even used Raspberry Pi units as the controllers for temperature monitoring and adjustments.
Once the beer has been made, IoT can also be used for logistics purposes, cutting waste and ensuring the timely delivery of beer to pubs, bars and supermarkets. RFID tracking systems allow businesses to track the position of their kegs in transit – handy when their resale value, even when empty, means they make an attractive target for thieves.
Becoming a brewer isn’t just a matter of learning the technical skills: there’s also the strong creative element of learning to combine and balance the hops, grains, yeast and other ingredients needed to create a good beer. It’s not something that you can learn overnight; it can take years of experience to master the process of creating recipes for new brews.
Recently, however, a new crop of brewers have teamed up with tech companies to put AI to work in the service of beer making. The first AI-powered brew was manufactured in 2016 by IntelligentX. It released the beer alongside a bot that gathered feedback from drinkers. The results were fed into an algorithm for analysis, with brewers tweaking the recipe according to the results.
The latest brewery to employ AI is MN Brew, a Swiss craft brewery that’s added a new line of AI-inspired beer called Deeper. To create Deeper, MN Brew teamed up with the nearby Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and local software company Jaywalker Digital. Students at HSLU were intending to create an AI that could diagnose skin diseases from photography, but, realising they didn’t have enough data, they settled on using AI to build beer recipes instead.
The AI, called Brauer AI, is based on natural language processing techniques, and was trained on more than 150,000 beer recipes. Now available as a web app on the university’s website, Brauer AI can generate recipes based on brewers’ preferences, such as the style of beer, which hops a brewery has in stock and which non-traditional ingredients they want to use.
The combination of ingredients wasn’t one that a human brewer would necessarily have put together, according to Marc Brevin, a researcher at HSLU who worked on the project. “This is something in the domain of artificial creativity, it should help the human brewers to look over the edge and try something new that they would have never thought about,” he said.
While it’s down to the AI to generate the recipe – the types of ingredients and the proportions
to use them in – brewers’ expertise is still required to produce the finished drink.
MN Brew used one of the recipes created by the AI to create a speciality IPA. The resulting brew, is “crisp, slightly acidic but still smooth,” said Karl Geiger, product development at MN Brew. “People have said they can taste lychee.” MN Brewery is convinced that AI-assisted brews have a future: the brewery is hoping to introduce further AI-inspired brews in the future.
Bot brewing
Covid-19 has brought with it no end of difficulties for the hospitality industry, not least reduced takings and problems with recruitment. Could robots help the industry with its post-pandemic recovery?
Spanish hardware company
Macco Robotics, which makes robots for use in restaurants, hostelries and coffee shops, says that it’s seen a change in people’s attitudes to robotic waiting staff. “The pandemic has affected robotics’ role in hospitality,” explained Kishhanth Renganathan , the company’s chief innovation and technology officer. “Prior to Covid, robots were looked at as taking human jobs or just as marketing.”
Now, though, hospitality businesses are warming to the idea that robots could serve patrons in a contactless way, as well as ensuring that the quality of drinks remains consistent. “Robots can definitely serve more drinks per hour compared to humans, but that’s not the only goal,” said Renganathan. “Robots can be more creative in the drinks that are being served, and the quality that can be maintained throughout: whether it’s the first cocktail or the thousandth cocktail, the quality is going to be same.”
Macco Robotics’ have built KIME, a robotic bartender. Sited in its own kiosk, the humanoid robot can be programmed to pour a number of drinks during service, from coffee to cocktails, beer to milkshakes. KIME’s technology is based on the same robotic arms that have been used in industrial applications such as car factories or agriculture. They have now been miniaturised and refined to serve beers to thirsty drinkers, who can pl ace their orders and pay via an app or a touchscreen at the robot bartender’s kiosk. The pint-pulling robot will then dispense the drinks while they wait.
Macco Robotics also makes robots that can deliver drinks to tables instead of bar staff. A partnership with Boston Dynamics even saw the company’s dog-like robot dispatched to a busy Seville bar to deliver beers to punters.
Does the advent of robot servers mean that the age-old practice of sharing your woes with the barman might be on the wane? Renganathan believes not.
Robots work best in high-traffic areas where speed is of the essence: nightclubs, festivals and modern bars that are frequented by younger drinkers who “just need the beer fast” and “don’t care who gives it,” said Renganathan. It’s the older generation, the pub dwellers, who “want that small talk with a bartender while they get their drink,” he added.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for the robots in your local. “When it comes to expe ri ential hospitality, I guess robots will be on the back end and not on the front end,” said Renganathan.
Whatever happens, you’ll still have someone to moan about the weather to at the King’s Arms.
Whether it’s the first cocktail or the thousandth, the quality is going to be the same from a robot