Blockchain Powered Beer

Craft beer brewing has enjoyed a renaissance over the past decade. As customers looking for an authentic beer experience, have dived into the creation process, brewers have obliged by highlighting their raw materials, equipment, and full creative process in brewery tours. As they sought further differentiation, the focus on creative authenticity only intensified: Neighborhood brewpubs, fresh beer with limited shelf-lives, and themes like brewing with botanicals instead of hops are all concepts designed to reflect and augment beer drinkers’ lifestyles.

This is where tracking of the raw materials becomes important. Alpha Acid Brewery sources local organic ingredients to make their beers. Their suppliers include GigaYeast, New World Ales, and Admiral Malting. They use a couple of logistics providers named Speedy Carrier and Quick Parcel Service to receive raw materials. After manufacturing their beers, they ship those to various customers such as The Beer Place, Beer and Pizza and The Pub.

Importance of the ingredients

Creating a story around the provenance of ingredients is a big theme at Alpha Acid Brewing. Tanks are fitted with sensors which let the customers see which malt and yeast suppliers contributed to the beer they’re drinking by scanning a QR code with their smartphones. Alpha Acid has set up records of its ingredient suppliers on Oracle’s Blockchain Cloud Service so it can track and sign off on production steps, including the dates and weather conditions under which ingredients were harvested.

Using IoT, Blockchain and AI to Track the ingredients

Oracle Blockchain Applications enable customers to track products through the supply chain on a distributed ledger to increase trust in business transactions, get better visibility across a multi-tier supply chain, accelerate product delivery and contract execution, and improve customer satisfaction. Alpha Acid Brewery is using Oracle Blockchain to authenticate the ingredients in their unique beer blend.

This screen shows the business network and the KPI bar at the bottom shows important information about the business transactions, and the insights derived from them.

You can use this trace screen to chronologically walk through the journey of the product and the documentation used on the way

The solution automatically correlated related transactions using the built-in AI/ML algorithms. This timeline view shows the tracking history transactions. Clicking on a transaction here displays the related business document that is securely committed to the distributed ledger.

• Provides authenticity of the ingredients
• IoTSensor data tracks brewing process temperature/ pressure to ensure highest quality craft beer
• Track and Trace – With track production process from raw materials to finished beer
• Improves quality and quality assurance
• Shortens the recall cycle and reduction of product affected

“Consumers are better informed than ever before and are increasingly interested in what is in the products they consume,” said Kyle Bozicevic, owner and brewer at Alpha Acid Brewing in Belmont, California. “We can now track materials and premium ingredients from our suppliers and analyze sensor data from the production process for each batch. Oracle Intelligent Track and Trace blockchain application helps ensure that we are getting the highest quality hops, malt, and yeast, and enables us to create a strong narrative around our products for customers.”

A large percentage of the food we eat is mass produced and we often have little idea what went into it and how it was produced.  Imagine if you could scan a QR code on your phone and then you had all the information about the ingredients, the production processes, the temperature, the controls and testing, and the packaging and distribution of your product –  Blockchain technology can solve this because it provides a non-repudiable transaction ledger that contains all this information from the suppliers and manufacturers upstream and then lets you as an end consumer see this information

It is also a big benefit to manufacturers because they can automate their processes reduce the amount of paperwork and then if they have to recall a batch they can trace the problem back to the source and do the smallest possible recall

The project was piloted

This Use Case was verified in January 2024 by Antony