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What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies
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."
I sell home beer and wine making supplies and ingredients in my hardware store. We've carried products since the mid-1990's and after a decline in activity there has been a big increase in the business in the last five years. I attributed the decline in home brew to the wide availability of micro-brews, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the hobby become popular again even with the large selection of craft beers in supermarkets. More and more of the brewers and wine makers are husband and wife, brewing as much to make drinkable beer/wine as they are trying to learn about the process. It's a small sample and our store is in an affluent suburb, but I'm encouraged by the number of people diving into this hobby which really touches on so many areas (cooking, science, and engineering/design to name a few). It's a natural product line for a hardware store because so much of the gear is just home-built gadgetry requiring plumbing, hardware, and housewares goods.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
When there is such an egregious error in the first couple of paragraphs, I almost stopped reading - because it's unlikely that someone that clueless could produce something interesting.
In the first place, "Germany", as a singular place that could enforce it's laws across it's entire territory didn't exist until 1871. In the second place, the Reinheitsgebot only applied to Bavaria - in the remainder of Germany, there were many innovative beers. In the third place, the Reinheitsgebot only applied to lager beers... In the fourth place, it's long since been repealed (I.E. it's not still in effect as he claims in his very first sentence.) etc... etc...
The balance of the article is much the same, a fanciful mixture of fact, fancy, and unsupported speculation disguised as something authoritative because the author is a professor.
For example - he talks about biodiesel production being illegal, but it never occurs to him to question why... Though I bet if he were the neighbor of the guy on the other side of town who had a 300 gallon tank of it collapse and flood two houses and salmon stream he might have other ideas. (Thank $DIETY it never found an ignition source.) The same goes for the Reinheitsgebot, which was created to prevent brewers from cheating their customers.
When one wonders why modern education produces substandard products - one need look no further than this article for evidence.
I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation,
Here's the most important lesson which I bet is either not covered accidentally or maybe intentionally.
I live in a greater-city which used to be the center of American beer brewing. A century or so ago, German immigrants built dozens of medium sized breweries and exported all over the country. Big big names, still around in marketing even today.
All of those jobs, and I mean all, are gone, inside the city. Every last one. Mergers inside the country and international, centralization, downsizing, blah blah, and now we've gone from dozens of breweries to a handful of microbrews, depending on how you want to count Sprecher (in a nearby city) and this brewpub by the local engineering college. A century ago there were dozens of people in my city with the job title "brewmaster" now there is debate but the number seems to hover right around "one" or "zero" depending how picky you want to be.
Similar thing happened in the automotive business, from hundreds of companies a bit over a century ago to just a handful now. Same deal multiple times with computing.
The lesson is that in a Emerging Technology there might be thousands of management and engineering jobs, but eventually its no longer an Emerging Technology then almost ALL of those jobs go away, permanently. If you're a 1 in a 100, maybe you can be a survivor making a long term career out of emerging tech, or if you enjoy perma-unemployment after a real fun 10 year run that'll work, but otherwise, if you see emerging tech, run like hell away, if you care about your family being able to eat and have a roof over their head. Run!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yeah, that's pretty much true! Breweries uses CIP (Cleaning In Place), and that means pumping large amounts of cleaning agents (usually sodium hydroxide and some acid, phosphoric, nitric or other) for about two hours depending on what tank, tun, pipe, hose. And large amounts of water. I have only worked at breweries. I'm a computer geek too, but I've never had the same passion for computers as I do brewing. Unless you're working in an office at a brewery, you're going to do alot of cleaning. At my previous job, I probably spent tree days a week swabbing floors, cleaning tanks, pipes and hoses. A brewery is the only place I've found that has everything I'm interested in: chemistry, physics, automation and control systems, biochemistry, microbiology, biotechnology and brewing. The brewing process is generally regarded as the oldest practice of biotechnology. You convert the starch, proteins, amino acids and alot more when you make malt out of grain. In the mash tun, you convert the remaining starches, proteins, beta-glucans etc to sugar and nutrition for the yeast. When you boil the wort, you coagulate proteins, isomerise (sorry, bad english. Not native language) the alpha acids in hops so they become soluable and more bitter. Mailard reactions gives the wort color and more flavour. Well, no need to ramble on. If someone would like some basic insight in the science behind the malting and brewing process, I recommend Beer: Tap Into The Art and Science of Brewing, buy Charles Bamforth. http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Tap-into-Science-Brewing/dp/0195305426/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330353116&sr=8-1 Or this video with Charles Bamforth called Advanced Chemistry of Beer and Brewing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2Hk_FV8c-w Oh, and I recommend anyone who are interested in beer and brewing to check out some homebrewing clubs that may be avalible in your area. Or check out http://www.homebrewtalk.com/ Homebrewing clubs is a good forum where you can learn and discuss brewing, hacking together improvements to the brew rig and brew beer with other people with the same interests.