To generations of people who grew up with microwave ovens, Instant Pots were novel but not entirely mind-boggling. They already understood Crock-Pots, rice cookers, and espresso machines capable of turning out precisely layered lattes at the press of a button. Like the Instant Pot, all these devices were met with some skepticism in their early days before achieving ubiquity. A 1993 New York Times article about a then-nascent technology—bread machines—states it plainly: “Negative attitudes toward bread machines may be dissipating as their advantages are recognized.”
Self-contained, all-in-one devices play a major role in how people in industrialized nations prepare food and beverages. We put raw ingredients in, and something ready-to-consume comes out—usually quickly. These tools can all be thought of under the umbrella of “magic boxes”: gadgets that transform materials efficiently, and out of our direct view.
The smallest-scale version of a magic box for alcohol might be something like the PicoBrew homebrew machine, which boasted that homebrewers could brew one of 100 all-grain recipes or create their own, “all at the touch of a button.” On a larger scale, ABV Technology has created the Equalizer, a cloud-connected machine that uses vacuums and a multistage separator to turn fermented beer into two products: a non-alcoholic beer and a neutral-flavored malt beverage that could become the base of a hard seltzer. Even some in the spirits world are touting their own magic boxes: A few distillers insist that pumping spirits with pressure or sound waves speeds up the aging process.
There have always been champions of such technology, and there have always been skeptics. Without an engineering degree, it can be difficult to understand what’s being improved inside these magic boxes. Easier to grasp is, potentially, what’s lost. Small beverage makers use the term “craft” to invoke a hands-on, physical approach to their creations—in contrast to the automated processes that occur behind metal walls. Craft means authenticity, they argue. How much can drinkers trust what they can’t see or explain? Where is the hand of the maker inside such boxes? The tech crowd counters that alcohol manufacturers have always adopted technology to make a better product, and finding faster, physically easier ways to brew or distill means opening the process up to greater innovation.
At stake in this argument is not just a battle between low and high tech. Food and drink are a canvas upon which we project our emotions and anxieties, our memories and feelings. When we draw lines in the sand about how alcohol is made—and whether a magic box is part of that—we’re defining authenticity, and separating the sacred from the profane.
When PicoBrew introduced its machine at the American Homebrewers Association’s (AHA) Homebrew Con in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2014, it received an expected level of blowback. That was in spite of the person demonstrating the machine: Annie Johnson, AHA’s homebrewer of the year in 2013, who had joined PicoBrew as its “chief beer officer.”
“We had people that hated us,” Johnson says. “They said that we were wrecking the hobby, that this wasn’t brewing.”
A PicoBrew machine looks something like a microwave crossed with an espresso maker. There’s no mash tun, kettle, or tubes visible, so homebrewers turned up their noses. But Johnson had a strategy to win them over: She handed out samples of PicoBrew-created beer as attendees watched the brewing process through a special version of the machine fitted with a transparent back panel.
“We let them see the man behind the curtain,” Johnson explains. “It was kinda like Willy Wonka’s factory for beer, and now you’re tasting it. We had to reveal the process to gain the trust.”
There was a level of comfort people needed to develop with the machine in order to trust it, comfort that could only be gained through physical senses. Johnson says it was the pure data and science that convinced her to work for PicoBrew; she read the lab results, which showed the machine eliminated common brewing off-flavors and maximized desired flavor and aroma compounds. But she understood that for most homebrewers, drinking is believing.
“We let them see the man behind the curtain. It was kinda like Willy Wonka’s factory for beer, and now you’re tasting it. We had to reveal the process to gain the trust.”
“There are folks who care about all these intricacies and the technology but the majority just want something that tastes good,” she says. “My message was: There are multiple ways you can get to a great glass of beer.”
This is a familiar process for most new food or beverage technologies: We greet what we can’t see or understand with skepticism or even fear. Countertop microwave ovens, introduced in 1967, had reached just 15% of U.S. households by 1977. Grandmothers in the 1990s still warned kids not to stand too close to them, lest the waves fry their eyes or brains. But by 2009, after decades of microwaves failing to make children’s heads explode, 96% of U.S. households used microwave ovens. Americans didn’t become convinced of their utility and safety through studies in scientific journals. Instead, they tasted the Swanson dinners and Hot Pockets and Orville Redenbacher popcorn and deemed the new technology acceptable.
This is what the purveyors of magic-box alcohol technologies are banking on: that enough people will taste and enjoy their products, and over time, machines that once seemed space-age will become as quotidian as a microwave. But such will not be the fate of PicoBrew—the company folded in March 2020 when it ran out of funding. Tech adoption can take time, and PicoBrew didn’t have the budget for it.
Picture the late-night infomercial: An enthusiastic pitchman promises you that his device will turn a regular barrel of beer into a barrel of non-alcoholic beer and a barrel of hard-seltzer base—just add water and watch it go!
Ben Jordan, chief technology officer for ABV Technology, has nothing in common, personality-wise, with an overbearing Slap Chop salesman. But the pitch for ABV Technology’s Equalizer might not feel out of place on after-hours TV. Jordan built a prototype of the machine—complete with duct tape and ill-advised exposed wires—when he was a grad student in chemical engineering at Harvard University, around 2012. Now, six Equalizer machines exist at breweries across the U.S.; each costs about $250,000.
The machine looks like a series of stainless steel tubes and hoses with an electrical box tacked onto the front. Inside, ethanol molecules within a fermented beverage—beer, cider, or wine—are replaced with molecules from deaerated water; alcohol becomes water, and vice versa. Jordan says the device keeps intact all the flavor, aroma, and other characteristics of a fermented beverage, but renders it non-alcoholic.
“The traditional methods of making non-alcoholic beer, going back a couple hundred years even, result in a product that most people don’t prefer,” Jordan explains. “‘Non-alcoholic beer sucks’ is kind of the impetus for our company.”
What ABV Technology bets is that, as with other such magic boxes, once the Equalizer proves itself valuable, its methods won’t seem far-fetched at all.
“I’ve heard a quote that goes something like: ‘All good science is like watching magic if you don’t understand it,’” Jordan says. (He’s thinking of one of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, which states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)
But, Jordan says, there’s no magic in the Equalizer, just molecular exchange—which, if you’re not an engineer or chemist, might as well be magic. What he’s getting at, though, is that technology in many industries advances at a pace that can seem beyond our comprehension. Ultimately, the Equalizer is no different from any other brewing machine, Jordan asserts. There’s just as much “magic” happening inside, say, a centrifuge, which many medium-to-large-sized breweries own, and which is today an uncontroversial tool in a brewer’s toolkit.
“With a centrifuge, beer and water go in, and it pushes beer out,” he says. “The goal of a good centrifuge company should be to make it so straightforward that you don’t know what’s going on in there. There’s a green light that’s on, and if your hose is attached, you’re good to go. There are tons and tons of physics inside, but the machines should be simple.”
Early adopters say the Equalizer is, in fact, that easy to use. Steve Kaczeus, co-founder and head brewer of Bootstrap Brewing Company in Longmont, Colorado, purchased and installed an Equalizer in his brewery in May, making Bootstrap the first Colorado brewery to do so.
“The goal of a good centrifuge company should be to make it so straightforward that you don’t know what’s going on in there. There’s a green light that’s on, and if your hose is attached, you’re good to go. There are tons and tons of physics inside, but the machines should be simple.”
“For us it’s pretty simple: Our beer goes in one end, and the machine processes the beer and we get the non-alcoholic beer out the other end,” he explains. “It’s pretty plug-and-play for us.”
This is the feedback Jordan had hoped for: that brewers can use the Equalizer without understanding the molecular-level chemistry behind it, and drinkers probably won’t give it a passing thought.
“Does it really matter what the technology is and how high-tech it is? I don’t think so,” Jordan says. “When you’re a consumer and you’re looking at, ‘Do I want to go to this brewery?’ or ‘Is this brewery something I identify with?’ you don’t really care what centrifuge brand they use.”
Kaczeus says proof of the machine’s value is in Bootstrap’s recent U.S. Open Beer Championship bronze medal for Strapless, its non-alcoholic IPA made using the Equalizer. He wouldn’t change a thing about the technology, he says, except to add one feature that would make the machine even more hands-off: a green light that turns on when a batch of beer is done brewing.
A distillery tour at Cleveland Whiskey in Cleveland, Ohio won’t look the same as a distillery tour at Four Roses or Woodford Reserve. For starters, it’s louder, as pumps are running constantly. And more notably, there’s no barrel-room portion of the tour, no hallowed stories of hoops and staves.
Cleveland Whiskey is a technology company that’s also a distillery, producing bourbon-style and rye whiskey using a patented “pressure aging” process that forces alcohol in and out of wood, at a vastly sped-up rate, via vacuums inside two huge steel tanks. Traditional bourbon takes a minimum of two years to age; Cleveland Whiskey’s CEO Tom Lix says his products can be ready in about 24 hours.
Lix doesn’t come from a distilling background, and he’s not fazed by the criticism his company’s taken from the media and other distilleries. He recalls an early review of Cleveland Whiskey in which the author’s first two paragraphs argued that, essentially, what the distillery was doing was immoral and heretical, an affront to whiskey makers everywhere.
“The author was saying that bourbon already has a perfect process, and that using science and technology cheats it—which is ignorant to the fact that most of the large distillers use science and technology, but just don’t show them to the public,” Lix says. “When you go on a Bourbon Trail tour, distilleries talk about the Kentucky water and all that, but never show you the huge reverse-osmosis machines where they strip everything out of it.”
Lix says his pressurizing tanks, named R2D2-1 and R2D2-2, not only speed up the aging process but eliminate problems inherent in using oak barrels. There’s no threat of mold, no potential for wood to go up in flames, no evaporation of the “angels’ share.” And because Cleveland Whiskey doesn’t age in physical barrels, its products can gain flavor from all types of novel wood, from black cherry to applewood. The way Lix sees it, his speed-aging machines are just a new tool to make more and better whiskey, which is what distilleries have always chased.
Technology has equally been a part of the commercial brewing industry since its inception. Theresa McCulla, curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., mentions mechanical refrigeration and automated canning as two such examples from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Technology has never not been important to beer,” she says. “Technology has always helped improve the quality, consistency, flavor profiles of beer, and to expand its reach.”
McCulla says that, in the oral histories she’s conducted with professional brewers, most describe their work as largely scientific, with a bit of room for artistry and subjective preference. Where tensions have arisen historically, though, is when automation or technology become associated with mass production. Homebrewers and early craft brewers in the 1960s through the 1980s were rebelling against the increasing industrialization and mechanization of beer.
In this way, they were participants in the counterculture and in the growing consumer movement around craft beer. Asserting the hand of an individual maker or artisan in beer brewing was an “activity to take back control” in a particular sphere, McCulla says. Early craft brewers built on homebrewing’s premise of reclaiming the means of making beer, with the goal of returning it to the hands of individuals rather than corporations.
But when one type of person holds the power of authorship, others inevitably don’t.
One of Annie Johnson’s favorite aspects of PicoBrew was the way the machine opened up brewing to people who wouldn’t traditionally have been able to participate in it. She mentions those with small apartments, or people who can’t lift heavy bags of ingredients. A man named Jess who she met at Homebrew Con in 2014 had severe rheumatoid arthritis, and was excited that PicoBrew would allow him to continue his homebrewing hobby.
Jess helped Johnson realize that when the beer industry clings to a certain vision of authenticity that’s based on physical brewing methods, it’s excluding people who can’t, for whatever reason, perform them. His story became a way for her to push back against critics who said that using a PicoBrew wasn’t true brewing.
“I would say, ‘You know, there are people who can’t hoist 25 pounds of grain.’ Why are you coveting? Why are you just hogging this all for you, and no one else can do it?” Johnson says.
Historically, homebrewing has been a domestic task without the elevated trappings of “authenticity.” In some cultures, it was largely the realm of enslaved people, or in others, predominantly done by women. It’s when brewing puts on the cloak of “craftsmanship” that white men seem to take control—with parallels to baking, cooking, and farming, for example.
“The author was saying that bourbon already has a perfect process, and that using science and technology cheats it—which is ignorant to the fact that most of the large distillers use science and technology, but just don’t show them to the public. When you go on a Bourbon Trail tour, distilleries talk about the Kentucky water and all that, but never show you the huge reverse-osmosis machines where they strip everything out of it.”
“I think this whole topic really gets to the essential question of what craft means, who’s deciding it, and most importantly, who has a stake in that,” McCulla says.
As Lauren Michele Jackson put it in an incisive essay for Eater, craft culture—“a special blend of bohemianism and capitalism”—looks like white people, tells white stories, and sells them to white consumers. Whether it’s beer, butcher shops, or boutique chocolate, “artisanal quality seems to generate the same set of descriptions—small-batch, local, sustainable, vintage, heritage, farm-to-table, nose-to-tail, crop-to-cup—even though the point of consuming craft products is to enjoy something unique.”
This isn’t entirely new. McCulla mentions the Arts & Crafts movement—an art and design ethos that prized craftsmanship and handmade objects—which flourished in the 1880s through 1920s as an explicit reaction against industrialization and mass production. While attempting to reintroduce the human hand into the fabric of daily life, the movement’s goals were also bound up in the singularity of white male genius.
Since “craft” first emerged, conceptually, in opposition to mass production, it has raised questions. Does “craft” mean something handmade and subjective? Does it require elbow grease to produce? Does it have to take time, space, and a certain type of equipment?
“Who is able to do all those things? Who has the time, space, capital, and know-how to produce what some would consider an authentically craft beer?” McCulla asks. “Checking all those boxes is going to point you toward a specific type of person and away from another type of person.”
Whether consciously or not, those who criticize magic-box technologies are generally those whose products thrive within the beverage industry’s status quo. Long-standing bourbon companies have a literal investment in thousands and thousands of barrels, and warehouses to store them. Skilled homebrewers have invested in perfecting their hands-on techniques. Craft breweries who cobbled together their brewhouses out of cast-off equipment are invested, in a way, in the romance of these scrappy origin stories. Even drinkers, at some level, are monetarily invested in forking over a premium for “small-batch” and “artisanal” food and beverages.
Beyond the financial stake, there’s, for some, a social and emotional attachment to the notion of “craft.” New technologies threaten to render those investments irrelevant, potentially at the push of a button.
“The realm of taste and flavor at some level can’t be quantified. Also, people have such emotional connections to beer and whiskey and food,” McCulla says. “So when you start to apply the realm of objectivity or automation, it prompts anxieties.”
Words by Kate BernotIllustrations by Ben Chlapek
