Never Drink Stale Beer Again with this New App

It’s probably not a problem that afflicts most beer drinkers, but stale beer is a major issue for those who make it. Whether they’re a multinational brewing corporation, an independent craft brewery or the humble home brewer — many a disgruntled beer-maker has had to throw away perfectly good beer because it had been stored for too long.

Now, a team of researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid has developed an ingenious new way of detecting when beer is going stale. Thanks to a technique involving small discs and a Smartphone — stale beer could be a thing of the past.

Prevention is impossible – but detection is not

It’s a sad fact of life that despite fermentation, beer does not get better with age the way that wine and spirits do. As it reacts with sunlight, it can obtain an abnormal and distasteful flavour, and although that can be overcome by using darker bottles, oxidation cannot. Oxidised beer has a tendency to taste like you’re chewing on cardboard, and due to the presence of oxygen everywhere – even inside bottlenecks – it’s an inevitable fact of life that it will happen sooner or later.

One way to tell if beer has become oxidised is by testing for the presence of furfural. This compound is always present in beer and is not responsible for its oxidation — but as the beer becomes stale the levels of furfural go up significantly.

Chromatography is key in the lab, not in the pub

One way to detect levels of furfural in beer is through the use of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). But, despite the accuracy with which HPLC can identify the presence of furfural in beer and thus determine how stale it is, it’s hardly something accessible to the home brewer and it requires specific equipment and knowledge, meaning it’s only really an apt solution for the laboratory.

The use of HPLC to analyse beer, whisky and juice is discussed in this article, Profiling and Quantification of Mono and Disaccharides and Selected Alditols in Juice, Beer, Wine, and Whiskey Using UHPLC with Mass Detection.

Colour-changing discs work in tandem with smart new app

The Madrid team have developed a film that reacts with furfural and changes colour when it is present. Better yet, the film is sensitive to the quantity of furfural, which means it can indicate the level of staleness.

After perfecting the film, the team developed a Smartphone app which can determine how much furfural is present — by using a calibration curve — and how stale the beer is simply from a snapped photo of the disc made from the film. By analysing the colour of the disc, anyone can see whether the beer is OK, on the verge of going stale, or has well and truly turned.

The app has attracted the attention of brewers looking to easily check their beers before shipping — meaning stale beer could be a thing of the past.