Drink

The world’s priciest coffee comes from civet droppings. New research confirms these “poo coffee” beans are chemically distinct – but does that make them taste better, or just pricier?

They're not serving sushi on the Moon – yet – but if or when they do, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and DASSAI want sake on the table. To attain this quaffable goal, the companies are sending a rice fermentation experiment to the International Space Station (ISS).

Drinking water in developed countries is pretty clean, but hidden nasties can still lurk. One mysterious “phantom chemical” has haunted drinking water for decades, and now researchers have identified it – and found it’s completely new to science.

Researchers in Germany have created a laser-powered extraction system that pumps out cold-brew about 300 times faster than traditional methods. Arguably superior in flavor, aroma and caffeination, cold-brew coffee may soon be convenient too.

A new kind of milk will soon hit US shelves but it isn’t some plant-based product designed to resemble dairy milk. Instead it is made from whey proteins produced by microflora engineered to spit out exactly the same proteins found in milk from a cow.

Have you ever wondered how many bubbles there are in your Friday knockoff beer? No? Well scientists apparently have, and in a new study they’ve finally answered the question nobody’s been asking, with a vague “a lot, we guess.”

The drinking straw seems pretty simple and unassuming, but it’s contributing to one of the most pressing environmental problems today. To help cut back on that, a start-up in Singapore is getting ready to launch the Chew, a reusable straw with a “chewable” rubber tip and a spin-dry mechanism.

Beer is generally thought to be about 7,000 years old, but now archaeologists have found clues that could date beer-making to almost twice that age, meaning it predates agriculture and represents the oldest record of man-made alcohol.

The Ocean Cleanup barge is currently on its way to tackle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it never hurts to find ways to reduce plastic before it gets into the sea. In that vein, Danish beermaker Carlsberg has announced the Snap Pack, a simple alternative to plastic six-pack rings.

A new device could let you taste a drink without consuming any sugar or calories. The Vocktail (Virtual Cocktail) digitally changes the way a drink tastes, smells and looks, sprucing up plain old water or fine-tuning an existing drink.

The excess liquid that's generated during tofu production takes the form of whey, and it's often just discarded. Now, however, scientists from the National University of Singapore have developed a technique for turning the whey into a tasty antioxidant-rich alcoholic beverage.​

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NSU)​ have developed a way to capture and digitally transmit the flavor of a drink that is reproduced using electrodes to trick your tongue into tasting the sourness of lemonade when all you're really drinking is boring old water.