If beer is the new wine, robots are the new beer snobs. Well, sort of.
Researchers in Barcelona have developed an electronic tongue that really knows the difference between a pilsner and a bock.
For now, it looks less like a slick, futuristic robot and more like a big of clump sensors. It's still a prototype, but its creators say it could some day replace human taste-testers.
And in a study published in the journal Food Chemistry, the researchers found that the robo-taste-tester can distinguish between different types of beer with 82 percent accuracy.
Manel del Valle, one of the study's authors and a roboticist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says that food and beverage manufactures could use the technology for quality control.
"The food industry needs to test lots of their products — and this is usually done by an expert," del Valle tells The Salt. "But if you transfer this expertise to a robot, you can produce at night, you can produce on the weekends." And manufacturers won't have to worry about having a taste-tester on hand at all times.
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