Latest Technological Advances in Beer Industry
In today’s climate of rapidly changing environment factors like global warming and pandemics as well as constantly changing technology, of course the beer industry is not going to be left behind.
Brewers are among the most innovative business owners across industries.
You have to be, if you think about it.
You take all this time and energy to make a great beverage, only to be edged out of the market by inferior tech? No way.
Brewers have a history of remaining on the cutting edge, and there is not reason that would change today.
History of Innovation in Beer
The very first innovation in beer was beer itself, to be honest.
While wine was a simple matter of leaving grape juice out to ferment, beer was a happy accident that became a global phenomenon quite quickly.
Anthropologists tell us that likely a woman out harvesting her grain found herself stuck in a sudden rainstorm. She took cover quickly, leaving her basket of grain out, and when she returned several days later, she found soggy grain and bubbly water.
Never one to waste food or freshly fallen rainwater, the woman made bread with the grain and served her family the water.
When they felt the slightly euphoric effects of the fermentation, a lightbulb struck.
It was not long before ale became the number one beverage in every household. Think about it – people could not trust the running water in streams and creeks that might make a family member sick, or even be deadly, but once fermented, the water became decontaminated.
And as the grain was not super sugary, the beverage would have had an alcohol content hovering closer to 1%, so not enough to cause a child to go on a drunken bender.
The next innovation then was related to that low alcohol content, and really the invention of what we think of as beer today.
Malt, Gruit, Hops, Yeast
For the next several centuries then, beer would become refined with a few innovations.
Malting the barley, or roasting or “kilning” it, converts the starches into sugars, making the wort a more appealing liquid to attract yeast, which then ensures a higher alcohol content, closer to 5%.
Gruit was the first herb mixture to be added to beer when brewers found their customers preferred a less sweet ale. Hops followed a couple centuries later and has stuck as the go-to herb to add bitterness to beer.
And finally, brewers learned to cultivate yeast from their batches for repitching and for growing their own yeast banks, freeing them from relying solely on nature to take its course.
And really, the whole point of innovation in the industry, whether we are in the year 1000 or the year 2000, is to provide a consistent product that customers love, will rave about, and will come back for.
Industrialization
Leap forward to the 1800s, and the rise of industrialization. Now we have commercial brewers selling a consistent, reliable, bottled product to their customers.
We also have commercial producers of yeast, so brewers could count on a reliable source of yeast for their product.
Leap forward again into the 1900s and the brewing industry introduced canning to their customers. Now you could buy beer in larger quantities for a lower price, without having to worry about things like skunk beer from light getting through glass bottles.
Modern Times
In the last 30 years, beer has moved rapidly into the future, perhaps making more changes to the industry than any other alcoholic beverage.
Likely due to the rise of craft breweries and smaller brew houses across the world, and the fact that brewers have no problem learning from each other, building on their colleagues’ progress, and celebrating each other, beer remains at the top of the beverage game.
Automation has allowed brewers to streamline their processes, storing, conveying, cracking, boiling and steeping, and fermenting their grain all in one space and with very little oversight and hands on involvement.
And still, the most recent technological advances have expanded the industry even further and allowed new products to reach a larger audience and for customers to provide real time feedback to their favorite breweries.
Self Pour Beer
Perhaps one of the most beloved innovations in beer of late has been the invention of self pour beer.
Entrepreneur Josh Goodman devised a tap system wherein the tap can be installed into a wall and customers can become their own bartenders, cutting down significantly on costs and wait time, and greatly increasing customer satisfaction.
Smart Flights
Much like self pouring beer, Smart Flight technology, created by a company out of Iowa, allows customers to use electronic flight paddles with waterproof touchscreens to taste various beers and then even share their experience to their social media accounts.
Meura Technologies
Meura is a company based in Belgium that provides the latest, state of the art machinery designed to make the storage and production of beer faster, simpler, and more user friendly. Their mash filter, for example, extracts liquid wort from grains in 45 different chambers using pneumatics.
AI and IOT
Perhaps the most interesting and useful tech from a marketing (but also from the quality control) perspective in brewing is Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, which allows breweries to track a wide range of data from customer experience to bottling issues.
Blockchain technology allows beer drinkers to track the origin of the grain in their beer. Brewery owners can track the distribution channels of their supplies coming in and their products going out, as well as inventory on site and with vendors.
Artificial intelligence is also used by the German Oculyze technology for yeast monitoring, replacing the time consuming and error-prone manual cell counting. Analyses such as yeast cell concentration and viability are done in less than a minute, helping prevent fermentation issues, ensuring product consistency and allowing brewers to reduce production costs by cropping, propagating and repitching yeast efficiently, instead of pitching fresh every time.
There is a dramatic rise in equipment and devices that make brewing a much more manageable business for an owner, and with so much data at your fingertips, adapting and shifting with changes and finding solutions to problems is so much easier today than it was even 50 years ago.
Cheers!
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Sources:
1. https://futuredrinksexpo.com/en/blog/insights-64/technology-is-taking-over-the-brewing-industry-by-storm-343.htm
2. https://techaeris.com/2022/05/20/six-recent-innovations-in-brewing-and-beer-technology/
3. https://growlermag.com/the-evolution-of-of-brewing-tech-innovations-that-have-redefined-beer-in-the-modern-age/
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