How to Make a Beer Come True

Craft brewers value their independence – their freedom is what makes their beers unique. A new alcohol and extract meter for beer, Alex 500 from Anton Paar, now frees craft brewers from the need for external laboratories. The reliable lab-grade analyzer determines their beer’s alcohol and extract content, calories, degree of fermentation and many more parameters whenever they wish. Now easily able to monitor their entire production from wort to bottle, craft brewers can always be sure to keep their customer promise.

Anton Paar has been a partner to the brewing industry for decades; by now the Austrian high-precision measuring instrument manufacturer is the world’s leading provider of alcohol and density measurement in the brewing industry. The company’s latest innovation is the Alex 500 alcohol and extract meter, based on a patented combination of technologies: absorption measurement via NIR spectroscopy and density measurement based on the oscillating U-tube technology.

Alex 500 puts craft brewers in control of their entire production process, from fermentation monitoring to quality control of the bottled beer. The compact, easily operated instrument can be used in two modes: In the fermentation monitor mode, it directly displays a fermentation curve, assigned to a tank via sample ID. In the final production stages, Alex 500 can be switched to its standard mode, to determine a beer’s alcohol content, original or real extract content and many other beer parameters like calories or degree of fermentation with lab-grade accuracy.

Alex 500 measures alcohol with an accuracy of 0.2 % v/v and determines density with an accuracy of 0.001 g/cm³. With these numbers on their side, craft brewers can be certain that their beer’s taste and quality are always stable, pint for pint. Best of all, brewers can handle the entire measurement procedure themselves, so they can always be sure that their taxes are correctly calculated and undesired deviations in production are immediately corrected.

This speed is one of many differences that set Alex 500 apart from the glass hydrometers still commonly found in smaller breweries. In contrast to these, Alex 500 covers the entire beer measuring range, not just part of it. Brewers are provided with direct, real-time results, without the necessity for a separate calculation or distillation. They only need one single instrument for all samples in their production – and it’s a really robust one that will not break on them. In addition, all data is automatically documented and perfectly traceable.

Craft brewers are given a wide range of new opportunities by Alex 500, an attractively priced solution based on decades of beer measurement expertise. The difference is freedom – to create outstanding new beer at all times, based on their own impulses, with all measurement necessities under their own roof.