Beer

For most of us, the home-brewing of beer is something that we leave to other people, because it just looks too complicated. Seattle-based company iGulu is out to change that, with its iGulu S1 automated beer-brewing machine.

The Draft Top is designed to take your beer can (and other drinks) to a new level. It cleanly and smoothly removes the lid from an aluminum vessel, allowing for better taste, less bloat, imaginative creations and, afterwards, some clever repurposing.

Beer from a can just ain't the same as beer from a tap, and a lot of it's about the foam. The Japanese take their beer foam pretty seriously, it would seem, and a design team reckons it's worked out how to deliver the perfect pour using an extra tab.

A monastic brewery in East Germany says it's created the first powdered beer. Just add water, and it'll froth up, complete with a foamy head and full flavor. The result promises massive savings on transport, because it can be shipped at 10% of the weight.

It’s hard to beat a draft beer, but we usually have to make do with bottles and cans when away from the bar. Enter the Cooler Keg, a new design for a draft beer dispensing system built right into a cooler.

Nothing tops off a day's adventure like an ice-cold beer. GSI Outdoors makes it easier to enjoy that beer anywhere with a vacuum-insulated cooler tube designed to stack two 12-oz cans and keep them chilled for the journey.

Yes, iron. Fine iron powder can burn at high temperatures, emitting nothing but rust as a by-product. That rust can be reduced back into iron powder using renewable energy to create a clean, renewable combustion fuel that could have big implications.

Every now and then, an invention comes along that makes us wonder how we ever lived without it – but those are in the minority. New Atlas rounds up the weirdest and wackiest inventions that left us scratching our heads this year.

​Countertop craft beer systems are not new, Seattle's PicoBrew has been offering devices of all shapes and sizes for a number of years. Now LG has decided to join the party with an automated machine called the HomeBrew, which will make its debut at CES 2019 in Las Vegas next month.​

Keurig is best known for popularizing the coffee pod machine, but realizing it’s always five o’clock somewhere, the company is now taking the concept out on the town with the Drinkworks Home Bar, which cooks up cocktails (or beer and cider, for some reason) from the same kind of premixed pods.

Aerogels are among the best thermal insulators, but their cloudy appearance doesn't work for windows, one of the worst offenders for letting heat escape a building. Now, researchers at Colorado University Boulder have found a way to make them transparent, recycling a beer by-product in the process.

San Francisco's Sufferfest Beer Company has come up with a new brew it claims boasts the electrolytes of some typical sports drinks, with a juicy superfood acting as the nutritional cherry on top. ​