Beer is a widespread fermented beverage produced all over the world in a variety of styles characterized by different physical and sensory properties including alcohol content, bitterness, color, pH, body, foam stability. The last decade has been characterize by an unprecedented boom of new microbreweries that are craft beer producers with a limited annual production fixed by law. According to the association “The brewers of Europe”, in Italy, the number of microbreweries doubled from 2011 to 2017, becoming almost 700 out of 868 active breweries. Most of them are small enterprises, with reduced financial capacity, that are not able to invest in expensive laboratory instrumentation. In this context, the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Salerno, together with the microbrewery Birring and the engineering company Spring Off, are developing a set of electronic devices for the beer quality control.

In our Demo we will present two different devices for the beer color evaluation. Color is one of the most important parameters of the beer, both for the quality perception of the customer and for the control of the production process. It is usually determined by means of a spectrophotometer method, which is expensive and requires skilled personnel in the laboratory.
Our devices are based on:

• Image acquisition and processing;
• Spectrophotometry.

They are low-cost devices that do not need any pretreatment of the sample, make them suitable for the microbreweries.

Domenico Di Caro, University of Salerno, Italy

Domenico Di Caro was born in Desio (MB), Italy, in 1972. He received the M.S. degree in Electronic Engineering and the PhD degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Salerno, Italy, in 1999 and 2018, respectively. He worked in the R&D Department for several telecommunication companies as embedded software engineer. He is currently research fellow at the University of Salerno, Department of Industrial Engineering (DIIn). His main interests are digital signal processing, electronic instrumentation and embedded software engineering.

Marco Carratù, Spring Off s.r.l.

Marco Carratù (M'16) was born in Brugg, Switzerland, in 1989. He received the M.S. degree in Electronic Engineering and Ph. D degree from the University of Salerno, Italy, in 2015 and 2019, respectively. He is currently with the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Salerno, as a Research Fellow in Electronic Measurements and he is also partner and CEO of Spring Off s.r.l. His current research interests include instrument fault detection and isolation, sensor data fusion, digital signal processing for advanced instrumentation, ANN and embedded system.

Antonio Caputo, Birring start up innovative s.r.l.

Antonio Caputo graduated in economy and management from the Link Campus University (Italy). He has managed and administrated several companies in the hotellerie field. Currently he is administrator and co-founder of Birring start-up innovativa s.r.

Adriana Erra, Birring start up innovative s.r.l.

Adriana Erra was born in 1965 in Salerno (Italy) from mixed Italian-british parents. She was bred between southern Italy and northern England where she was educated. Her working experience began very early as interpreter in a multinational company. In the meantime, she took a degree in foreign languages and literature. She then worked as an English teacher at University of Naples, at the faculty of medicine. She is currently involved in Birring start-up innovativa s.r.l. as a purchasing manager.