Beer Tongue
February 10, 2014 I enjoy beer, although my annual consumption is far less than the 78 liter per capita average for the United States. I need to limit my beer consumption, so that these blog articles remain comprehensible; or, at least, less incomprehensible. More than 24 billion liters of beer are consumed in the US each year, so beer is big business. The legal drinking age was eighteen when I was in college in the 1960s. This wasn't a good idea, and that's why the age has been raised to twenty-one. This was a time long before today's microbrew culture, so there wasn't much of a choice of what to drink. One interesting thing we would do in those days was to buy an assortment of lesser known beers from a beer distributor. The distributor likely got small quantities of these gratis from companies hoping to get brand recognition. With this stock, we would have a beer tasting party to rank these in order of preference. One thing we learned at these parties is that different people enjoy different tastes. This was an example of the Latin maxim, "De gustibus non disputandum est" ("About taste there can be no argument"). Nowadays, my favorite beer is Heineken (from glass bottles, only), but I'm sure there are many who don't like Heineken. Beer is very easy to make. Cereal was first farmed about 11,000 years ago, in the early Neolithic period, and it's thought that the first beer was produced shortly thereafter. Beer production, or brewing, simply involves steeping cereal grains in water, then fermenting the mixture with yeast. The brewing process may be simple, but the beer product contains a complex mixture of chemicals, most of which are listed below.[1] |
| Geraniol (C10H18O), a chemical found in beer, is a flavoring compound in many fruits. Carbon = black, hydrogen = white, and oxygen = red. (Illustration by Jynto and Ben Mills, via Wikimedia Commons.) |
"The concept of the electronic tongue consists in using a generic array of sensors, in other words with generic response to the various chemical compounds involved, which generate a varied spectrum of information with advanced tools for processing, pattern recognition and even artificial neural networks."[3]
 | Ion-selective electrodes of the beer tongue, alongside a can of beer. Moritz is a Barcelona beer brand. (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona image by Manel del Valle.) |
References:
- Gilmare A. da Silva, Danilo A. Maretto, Helena Maria A. Bolini, Reinaldo F. Teófilo, Fabio Augusto and Ronei J. Poppi, "Correlation of quantitative sensorial descriptors and chromatographic signals of beer using multivariate calibration strategies," Food Chemistry, vol. 134, no. 3 (October 1, 2012) pp. 1673-1681.
- Xavier Cetó, Manuel Gutiérrez-Capitá, Daniel Calvo and Manel del Valle, "Beer classification by means of a potentiometric electronic tongue," Food Chemistry, vol. 141, no. 3 (December 1, 2013), pp. 2533-2540.
- An electronic tongue can identify brands of beer, Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology Press Release, January 30, 2014.
- Patrycja Ciosek and Wojciech Wróblewski, "Potentiometric Electronic Tongues for Foodstuff and Biosample Recognition—An Overview," Sensors, vol. 11, (April 28, 2011), pp. 4688-4701. A PDF file is available here.
- Xavier Cetó, Manuel Gutiérrez-Capitá, Daniel Calvo and Manel del Valle, "Beer classification by means of a potentiometric electronic tongue," Food Chemistry, vol. 141, no. 3 (December 1, 2013), pp. 2533-2540.