Long before social media, the Internet, computers, and electronics, there was beer. The art of brewing has been around for an estimated 7,000 years, so surely such an ancient craft has no need for developments in cloud technology.
We explore three of the devices available to consumers that you yourself could purchase and use, should you want to a) make beer, and b) continue to be a tech nerd as you do.
Bluetooth in brewing
Read any beer label and it will likely mention just four ingredients: grain, hops, yeast, and water. Put a mix of these four into a bottle and you will, sadly, not get a beer. It takes a little more work, but in the age of technology the calculations, timings, and 10,000 hours of experience can all be substituted by a Bluetooth controlled device, the Grainfather.
This big, Bluetooth powered ‘pot’ will do almost all the work, based on a recipe loaded onto the system. It will call upon its trusty human, via an app, to pop the ingredients in, as and when required, meaning the would-be drinker can leave it be, and be informed only when needed to make sure things run smoothly.
Wi-Fi in fermenting
It turns out that beer isn’t as easy as mixing those four ingredients together, even when using a Grainfather. The liquid output must ‘ferment’ and turn into beer, creating both the alcohol and carbon dioxide as it does.
To help understand how much alcohol is being created, and when fermentation is done, homebrewers are turning to a 3D-printed open-source ‘hydrometer’, called the iSpindel. This device, which is a DIY version of the commercially available ‘Tilt’ (which uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi) sits in the beer and calculates the ABV by how much the device tilts.
IoT for serving
By this stage, the beer is made and ready to drink. But the tech revolution in brewing doesn’t stop here. It turns out there is even an IoT device called ‘Plaato’, who product a gravity scale amongst a plethora of other smart brewing devices which sits under a keg and works out how much beer is left, helping the pourer known when the last drop is likely to come (and therefore when they’ll need to crack out their Grainfather and iSpindel again to make some more!)
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.