Showing posts with label bottle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bottle. Show all posts

A Useful New Brew Tester: brewPal

Brewing goes high-tech. Well at least it does for small breweries. There is nothing worse than gulping down a cool stubbie and getting a flat, foul tasting experience. This seldom happens, of course, due to testing of the product in its creation.
Stubby beer from small Australian brewery
Invisible Sentinel has made a fantastic new product that solves most of the problems. A tiny device like a pregnancy tester called brewPal fits comfortably into your hand.  It analyses a beer's DNA and shows only one of two findings: either the beer is clear, or it has a spoiling infection.

When you exercise, lactic acid builds up in your body. This makes you feel tired. Excess lactic acid is also the cause of "off" beer. Unwanted bacteria produce the acid. Lactobacillus and Pediococcus are resistant to hops so they thrive in the brew. Oddly, some beers need these bacteria.

Culturing beer in the lab was time-consuming, especially in the hunt for Lactos and Pedis. It takes a week. Small companies can now test their beer with brewPal at the time of bottling to ensure a quality product. At last a company makes something really useful!
✴ Biology by Ty Buchanan
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Male Jewel Beetles Mate With Stubby Beer Bottles

Australian jewel beetles are sexually attracted to stubby beer bottles. These are small bottles, brown in color, that fit comfortably in the hand. Darryl Gwynne wrote about the phenomenon in a post-doctoral paper. He had noticed the behavior 23 years ago. Ultimately, the opportunity arrived to inform the world. He was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize.

Male beetles were observed mounting discarded stubbies. The bottles are the same tone of brown as female jewel beetles. Moreover, they glint in the sun like the wings of females.

Mounting the bottles is dangerous. It usually ends in death for male beetles. They are either eaten by ants or are cooked in the hot sun. It is feared that the behavior will lead to a decline in beetle numbers. However, the beetles are still present in high numbers two and half decades after the behavior was first observed.
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Science