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What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies

Posted by timothy on from the cause-of-and-solution-to dept.

cold fjord writes that Assistant Professor and lecturer Dave Conz has an interesting article at Slate, from which: "I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation, which is why I teach a senior capstone course at Arizona State University called the Cultural and Chemical History of Beer. ... Home brewing is part of a broad spectrum of DIY activities including amateur astronomy, backyard biodiesel brewing, experimental architecture, open-source 3-D printing, even urban farming. ... Many of these pastimes can lead to new ideas, processes, and apparatus that might not otherwise exist. Depending on your hobby and your town, these activities can be officially encouraged, discouraged, unregulated, or illegal. For example, it's illegal to make biodiesel fuel at home in the city of Phoenix ... but not regulated in the bordering towns of Scottsdale, Chandler, or Tempe."

2 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Never seen anyone so eager to wash things. Kettles, instruments, bottles, everything. Brewing is a never ending sanitization process. If that's what you'd rather be doing, then you should go for it.

  2. Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer by gcore · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a homebrewer, sure, the sanitation may look like that. But in an actual brewery, things are a bit different. In the brewhouse: the malt mill, the mash tun, the lauter tun, the wort kettle, the whirlpool, the plate heat exchanger, all pipes and lines connecting them. The malt silos should also be cleaned, but not on a weekly basis or once a day. The fermentation cellar: floor, hoses, pipes, fittings, propagation vessels, fermentation tanks, lager tanks, equipment for analysis. Several times a day. The filter: floor, fittings, hoses, pipes, the filtration devices, pressure tanks. This needs to be done several times a day. Filling hall: beer line from the filter, filling cylinders, the filling machines, rinsers, floors, transport bands... yeah, just about everything in the filling hall because at that point, the quality of the beer can not be improved, just maintained. Oh, and crates, bottles. Here everything needs to be sanitized several times a day. At a modern brewery, there's ALOT of cleaning. At any given time, if you find yourself without anything to do you can always go and swab the floors with sodium hydroxide or chlorine. In many cases in a brewery, sanitation needs to be done BEFORE and/or AFTER each process. But yeah, different for most homebrewers.