Tiny ‘BeerBots’ Dive Into The Brewing Process To Speed Up Fermentation

Traditionally, beer is made of grain, yeast, hops, and water. However, a team of scientists from the Czech Republic is adding another ingredient that might have you scratching your head: magnetic robots.
 
These ‘BeerBots’ are meant to speed up brewing and cut down what would have been a month-long process into a fraction of the time.
 
Beer is brewed by soaking malted barley in water to release fermentable sugars. The resulting liquid, called wort, is boiled with hops for flavor. Next, yeast is added to ferment the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. After fermentation, the batch is conditioned, carbonated, and voilà! You’ve got beer!
 
Unfortunately, this takes a month, and between then and when the drinks reach the shelves, there is a chance of spoiling along the way.

Martin Pumera and his team are trying to solve this issue with their BeerBots. These are two-millimeter-wide capsules containing active yeast, magnetic iron oxide, nanoparticles, and sodium alginate from algae. All of which is then mixed in ferric chloride solution.
 
Once they are dropped into a batch of beer, the bots move up and down as they ferment sugar, and from there, they create carbon dioxide bubbles that push them to the surface. At the top, they release carbon dioxide and then sink. The sugar ferments quicker this way, and once they have used up all the sugar, they drop to the bottom of the solution, where that magnetic iron oxide element comes into play, and a magnet is used to scoop them all up.
 
The BeerBots could be used for three fermentation cycles, increasing their efficiency and long-term usability.
 
 
 
[via Trend Hunter and Study Finds, images via various sources]