For the average beer drinker, distinguishing between brewing styles using taste alone may be challenging - Kölsch, for example, is an ale that looks and tastes like a lager - but a new electronic tongue can distinguish among beer styles with more than 80 percent accuracy, according to its developers.
The electronic tongue concept could one day be used to give robots a sense of taste, which the developers say could be used in the food industry as a replacement for human taste testers, which they say would lead to improved quality and reliability of food products.
The beer-tasting electronic tongue was developed by scientists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who published their research in the journal Food Chemistry.
"Using more powerful tools - supervised learning - and linear discriminant analysis did enable us to distinguish between the main categories of beer we studied: Schwarzbier, lager, double malt, Pilsen, Alsatian and low-alcohol," said Manel del Valle, the main author of the study.
Del Valle added that the success rate of the beer-tasting tongue was 81.9 percent.
The electronic tongue made of an array of sensors with 21 ion-sensitive electrodes that are capable of detecting ammonium, sodium, nitrates, chlorides and other ionic compounds.
"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," del Valle said.
The sensors react differently to the properties of the different beers, and based on information provided to the electric tongue, it was able to correctly identify what it was tasting most of the time.