C o m m en t
B r ewe r y
T echnology
Future Flavours
Mike Eagar, co-founder and CEO at Ottawa, Ontario-based Kegshoe, looks at how technological advances in and around the brewing industry will help breweries make more consistently great beer.
T
he art challenges the technology and the technology inspires the art.” John Lasseter definitely wasn’t talking about the craft brewing industry when he was quoted saying this, but as one of the world's oldest and most popular concoctions, the secret to beer may lie in its mix of artisanship and engineering. Everyone has their own opinion on where the future flavors and styles of beer should head next, but what about the tech? What’s out there already? What could be? New technology aiding in production continues to improve as systems become more precise and track more data — all while getting cheaper. Fantastic tools like BrewPi and other open source Raspberry Pi rigs are helping brewers bring more consistency to their brews by controlling temperature, tracking flow rates, or managing raw materials. They unfortunately won’t do any of the heavy lifting for you yet, but give Boston Dynamics a few more years and even that might be doable. The world will never do away with sales teams and the beer scene is no different. Yet just as carpenters upgraded from hammers to nail guns, sales teams will always be upgrading their tools. The front pages of Twitter and Instagram are plastered with anecdotes from fun-loving brew teams or pictures of new
20 | Brewers Journal Canada | Spring 2017
bottle designs (and for some reason everyone turning different brewing tools into coffee mugs). Behind the scenes, sales teams utilize tools like Slack to keep on track with each other and different CRMs to keep in contact with all their clients. Integration is key and new technology continues to surface making things quick and easy. Inventory management is nothing new when it comes to technology, and with legislation requiring many breweries to keep track of where all their inventory ends up it’s been in use throughout the beer industry for many years. Tools range from ledgers to barcode systems. Increases in access to this information and more precision to detail can be seen as this side of the industry takes to the cloud. As for the future? IntelligentX Brewing Company is even letting technology take over recipe creation. They’ve built some machine learning software to take customer feedback and directly relate it back to their next batch. Probably taking the human art out of things a little too much for some, but it’s a very exciting use of cutting-edge software. We can’t wait for HAL to list off a set of computer generated seasonals. Craft will never be able to do without the skill and style of it brewers, nor does anyone really want it to. Technology in the brewing industry just hopes to help everyone make more consistently great beer, and really, who can fault that?
www.brewersjournal.ca