A winning brew at University of Pennsylvania contest
A technique that vastly speeds the fermentation of beer has won a University of Pennsylvania student team the $10,000 grand prize in the 2016 Y-Prize competition.
A technique that vastly speeds the fermentation of beer has won a University of Pennsylvania student team the $10,000 grand prize in the 2016 Y-Prize competition.
The prize also gives the "Fermento" team - Alexander David, Shashwata Narain, and Siddharth Shah, students in the Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science - rights to commercialize their use of the Penn-owned biomedical engineering technology behind their beer application.
Their discovery speeds up the fermentation process in beer production by up to nine times without sacrificing alcohol quality and composition at an industrial scale, according to a statement from Wharton. It does so by increasing the surface area of liquid sugars exposed to the yeast used to convert sugar to alcohol.
The Y-Prize is a cross-disciplinary competition cosponsored by Penn Engineering, the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Wharton Entrepreneurship and Penn Center for Innovation. Students propose innovative commercial applications for technology developed by Penn researchers.
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