You download an app, use your finger to select one of the glasses you can see on the screen, and choose what size beer you want poured. Then you press OK to the price that you see on the screen, the correct amount is deducted from your account and hey presto, and the draught beer system begins pouring the beer you’re thirsting after.

That’s how the advanced, high-tech draught beer system works. It is the result of an intense collaboration between teachers and engineering students from Chemistry and Biotechnology and Information and Communication Technology at Aarhus University School of Engineering.

A good idea
– and a good story

That is to say that it DID work as it should before the summer holidays, as reported by teachers and students to the many journalists who had no difficulty spotting that this was a good story.

Many of the people who read the stories in Danish, Norwegian and even Russian media, made clear that they would like to get their hands on one of these fully automated systems, which were able to take orders, accept payment and pour a beer with the correct amount of froth in a matter of seconds.

Mistakes equal learning

In this situation many people would probably feel weighed down by all the attention when it turned out the system was not quite so functional following the summer holidays.

But that’s not the case for three of the men behind the project; Associate Professor Jesper Rosholm Tørresø, business engineering student Aik Petersen, and Associate Professor Christian Dannesboe.

Aik Petersen does not hide his frustration with the machine, which he and his fellow students have invested a lot of effort in developing, and the fact that it’s no longer able to register payment from a customer – or that, when it finally manages to do so, it goes on to test the customer’s patience when it comes to the time taken to pour the beer.  

But the two teachers view the faults that have arisen in the machine as an opportunity for the engineering students to learn something new. 

"Even though we’ve seen a great deal of interest in the draught beer system among people who’ve read about it, as well as those who have seen it in action, it’s still a prototype that we have to test. This needs to be done among the students here, because I’m certain they’ll take ownership. In the sense that they won’t just get annoyed when an error occurs but will start trying to find out what needs to be done to get the system to work as intended," says Christian Dannesboe. 

Collaboration on the development of the draught beer system is not confined to students at Aarhus University School of Engineering. Students from Aarhus School of Architecture have been given the task of designing a housing for the draught beer system, which will then be printed in 3D.

Watch the video with a demonstration of the draught beer system at omnibus.au.dk