A company named Cana sez it has developed a beverage dispensing machine that will molecularly print thousands of different drinks - including wine and other alcoholic drinks.
It will print:
Sodas
Sports drinks
Fruit juices
Wine
Cocktails
And others
Refills are free, but you will pay by the drink. $499 for the first 10,000 and $799 after that.
I can see this working for drinks that are basically chemical formulas themselves, e.g. soda. I can even see it working for fruit juice pretty well.
Booze and especially wine? Not beyond the plonk. Take wine... It's grapes, but what gives any good wine its character is that grape, grown in a particular area, on specific soil with a given exposure during a specific vintage that's then made from grape juice into wine through a myriad of decisions by a winemaker.
Control for everything but vintage and you still get different wines from year to year because weather varies. Pick grapes at a different ripeness and you get a very different wine. Then there are wines like the Minervois I had last weekend. It's all of the above... but a blend of grapes. There are some regulations on what can be blended etc (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minervois_AOC) but each winemaker will make different choices vintage to vintage. ANd then how to you raise it? New wood? Older wood? A mix? In stainless?
All of that is what makes wine truly interesting to anyone who's into it. Could they print some generic red or white? Yeah. Could they print thousands of variations that account for everything above? Nah.
Last edited by rickgregory; March 4, 2022, 11:18 AM.
Absolutely agree, you can't make decent wine or beer mixing molecules on the fly, no way, no how. Beer fermentation is an even more complicated process than is wine fermentation.
I believe I would definitely preorder this if we hadn't just cut out soft drinks.
Still it would be interesting to see if it would be cheaper to use than brewing our own ice tea each day. We go through 1/2 gallon or more per day and brew it strong!
Hey I am of a mind that our foods and beverages are so modified already that this might even be beneficial to health.
I saw this too. It's worth noting the Keurig cocktail maker already went belly up. It supposedly dispensed beer as well as cocktails. I briefly wanted one until I realized I have a full bar in the basement and a minibar in the dining room and I actually enjoy mixing drinks.
I am very tempted to preorder and risk it.
My biggest concern is the cost of the monthly subscription as it doesn't state that anywhere clearly>
Am I missing that?
@pkadre thank you. This is definitely sounding interesting.
Is there any way to determine the per drink charge for the non alcoholic beverages? I do like gadgets and gizmos.
The year is 2023. Yet, nearly everything we buy starts in carbon-intensive factories, gets distributed in gas-powered vehicles, then collects in landfills. Despite quantum leaps in material sciences, computing, and nanotechnology ... The way we make and distribute stuff is stuck in the past …
My gear:
22 Weber Kettle
Napoleon PRO Charcoal Kettle Grill
Broil King Keg
Traeger Pro 34
Napoleon Prestige Pro 500
Pit Barrel Cooker
Blackstone Range Combo Griddle
<climbing on soapbox>
Setting aside any discussion regarding the quality of the drinks this thing produces and putting on my infosec hat, I am really glad to see that Cana will be pushing updates rather than relying on the customer to do so. Assuming that Cana actually has their security ducks in a row (applies to any IoT vendor) then pushing updates is a much, much better model than relying on the end customer as most of them either don't know how, can't be bothered, or simply don't think about it. IoT vendors, by and large, are horrible at security. I have very few IoT devices in my home as I have an extremely high bar for the security posture of these items.
<climbing off soapbox>
The wine and other alcohol will be more of a success. You will have to breathe into a Breathilizer, if drunk enough, it will allow you to purchase and you'll be too drunk to know what's up and what's down.
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