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."

Comments

I'll need to tell that to my employer

[vikingpower]

"Beer brewing a source of innovation. Send me on a training, ASAP plz".

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[gcore]

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.

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[gcore]

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.

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[plopez]

At my local Uni they have a brewmeister course. A lot of people say "cool, sign me up!" Until they discover they have to take biology, chemistry statistics, and all the other courses a professional brewmeister should have. Then they suddenly lose interest. Still, there is a waiting list. This is probably overkill for home brewers.

For home brewers, in my area kits are plentiful as are places who do on premise craft brewing. You rent the equipment, buy some materials, and brew your own. They even have pros who will teach the craft. On premise wine making is becoming popular as well. We live in a golden age....

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[Anonymous Coward]

You're apparently pretty physics challenged. Maybe you should go stumble around wikipedia for a while.

Recoil kicks straight back along the barrel axis, and has nothing to do with gravity. Since your grip is below (in the standard grip) the barrel, the recoil + the forward force from your hand that keeps the gun more-or-less stationary generate a moment, which rotates the gun upward. Change the grip, you change the moment axis, and thus the rotation plane.

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[nedlohs]

What exactly does gravity have to do with it at all? And what is this fundamental part of recoil that produces an upward force.

My brain can really only see newton's second applying a force opposite that of the one making the bullet travel out of the gun. So essentially straight backwards.

Except of course the guns center of gravity is unlikely to be exactly in line with that force and so you get torque. Also you are holding the gun below where that force is being applied providing a pivot for the same conversion into torque.

This doesn't cause the gun to be driven upward, it causes it to rotate. If you were to holsd the gun sideways that same pivot would now cause the gun to rotate sideways.

Re:I'll need to tell that to my employer

[nedlohs]

third law, dammit!

Beer Goggles?

[pegasustonans]

I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation

The last time I used beer as a lens, I woke up surrounded by 15 naked people with spotty memories of sleeping with the babysitter.

Homebrew rebound

[John3]

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.

Re:Homebrew rebound

[vlm]

I sell home beer and wine making supplies and ingredients in my hardware store.

As a guy who brewed beer in the past and probably will again in the future, most of the stuff you sell to brewers, you probably don't know about.

I used to buy replacement plastic transfer hoses, copper tubing and handful of strange compression fitting adapters to make my own wort chiller, tubes and hoses to make my own homemade bubbler/vaporlock thingy, etc etc. I purchased all the gear to make what amounts to a remote faucet system on a hose for cleaning. I had the worlds weirdest rube goldberg device to fill bottles. For wine/mead supposedly the most expensive and traditional primary fermenter is a glass carboy, and supposedly the cheapest is a food grade plastic bag (not insecticide treated garbage bag) inside a non-value engineered old fashioned strong metal trash can. Supposedly prices have exploded upward so much that the cheapest durable and watertight primary "couple gallon" fermenter is a standard tropical fish aquarium, although keeping light out and the top sealed must be a huge PITA.

I never bought "normal homebrewing stuff" from a hardware store like yeast and hops, bottle caps for my crimper, whatever. Thats cool that you sell that stuff as I have 4 hardware stores within 5 miles, but my local "homebrew store" was at least an hours drive. In the internet era its more realistic to order online and wait a day or two, than to invest that kind of windshield time.

Re:Homebrew rebound

[John3]

When I first started brewing at home (about 1987) it was because all that was available locally was the watery American beers. As more and more craft brewers sprang up the price of quality beer dropped and it was easier to find it at local retail shops. Even my Stop & Shop has about 12' of decent craft beer (Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn Brewing) and at a reasonable price. I think for a while this caused a decline in the hobby...it became cheaper and easier to locate decent beer so people that brewed just to get good beer no longer needed to brew at home. Just the die-hards continued to brew their own beer, but in the last five years it has bounced back.

Re:Homebrew rebound

[John3]

it became cheaper and easier to locate decent beer so people that brewed just to get good beer no longer needed to brew at home

That's like trying to argue that people only cook at home because there are not enough restaurants. "If they'd just open a Thai restaurant around here, then architects could stop putting kitchens in homes". Don't think so...

Not really an accurate analogy. Cooking at home is cheaper than eating at the Thai restaurant, usually significantly. When you cook your Thai meal you don't need to wait two or three weeks to eat it, and you make much less of a mess in your kitchen than if you were brewing beer. Brewing beer at home costs the same as or more than equivalent micro-brews (assuming you have a decent beer retailer in your area), plus you need to do the work (cook, sanitize, and wait for fermentation to complete). So if you run out of India Pale Ale you can drive to Stop & Shop and plunk down $19.99 for a case of Sierra Nevada IPA (in the fridge), or mail order homebrew supplies (two cases worth of ingredients for $45), wait a week, brew the beer, wait a week, rack the beer, wait a week, bottle the beer, wait two weeks, and then drink it.

From my experience selling homebrew supplies for over 17 years, the increased availability of micro-brews definitely encouraged the casual home brewers to store the gear and stop brewing. In the mid-1990's there were many independent homebrew shops in our county, but they all went out of business by 2001. We considered dropping the products when business dipped, but as each independent shop closed we picked up a few more customers so our sales stayed basically level during this tough stretch. Many of the people that stopped brewing have started again as they enjoy the hobby, but the reasons for brewing at home are now purely for the enjoyment of the hobby versus the late 1990's when the lack of micro-brews was a big factor.

Interesting to note that homebrewing has been popular in England for much longer (it was essentially illegal in the US until 1979), but in England people brew to avoid the high beer taxes. They use sugar instead of malt for many recipes as they are brewing to save money. You can still see this when you read recipes on cans of British beer kits as they all refer to adding sugar, whereas most US homebrewers avoid sugar and use malt extract instead.

Re:Beer goggles instead of safety goggles?

[El Torico]

Hence the phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Re:great

[John3]

Yeah, in our community kids are always spending $100+ to buy homebrew gear, cooking and then fermenting, and two to three weeks later getting s**t-faced on their homebrew. Or more likely they head to the local Kwikee Mart with a fake ID buy a cheap case of light beer in cans and get s**t-faced immediately. The article is not about consuming alcohol, it's about the brewing process and technology.

Most important lesson

[vlm]

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!