A couple weeks ago, we took a look at some of the worst ideas in gimmicky alcohol technology that have come out lately. Today, let's turn that on its head. After all, we aren't total grouches here at Duffy's Brew! The march of progress also includes great new technological ideas for making beer better.

So, let's highlight some of the fantastic futuristic ideas that are changing how we drink.

Five Ways Technology Is Making Beer Better!

1 - The Fish-Edible Six Pack Ring

When we heard about what Florida's small indie SaltWater Brewery was up to, we thought it was so cool that it basically inspired this entire list.

Everyone has heard the horror stories about how terrible beer six-pack rings are for the environment, with birds getting tangled up in them while fish and turtles choked on them. Well, SaltWater has a solution: A six-pack ring made of wheat and barley byproducts from the brewing process. It's biodegradeable, breaks down slowly in water, and is 100% safe for marine life to eat.

(And probably humans too, but it's not advised. Or tasty.)

This is an amazing idea, and we hope they license the tech to plenty of other breweries.

2 - The PicoBrew Home Brewing Machine

So, we can all agree an Internet-of-Things winebottle is ridiculous. But a cloud-enabled home brewing apparatus that's only slightly more complicated than a home bread maker? Sign us up!

The PicoBrew (currently taking preorders) allows home brewing of a wide variety of pre-packaged ingredients, or "freestyle" creation of your own brews from whatever you like. Cloud-connectivity allows it to download and share recipes. It even periodically "phones home" to report the health of the brew and auto-adjust the brewing\fermenting cycles if there are problems.

At $1700ish, it's not going to be in everyone's home yet. But if the tech gets cheaper, this could be a real homebrew game-changer.

3 - The BACtrack Skyn

For something a little different, we have to look at the darker side of drinking: Alcohol kills thousands of people every year, and contributes to uncountable other medical issues. And one of the biggest problems was that doctors had no way of knowing how much alcohol a patient had drank recently, aside from their current blood-alcohol levels.

Enter the BACtrack Skyn. This brand-new device just took home a $200,000 prize for being a wearable that can report on a wearer's drinking history, just based on analyzing their sweat. It's still a prototype, and pending FDA evaluation, but this could be a major step towards preventing a lot of needless deaths.

4 - iPourIt Self-Serve Taps

Previously, the luxury of being able to get up and refill your drink whenever you wanted was contained solely in classy exclusive joints like McDonalds and Burger King... but not any more. If iPourIt has their way, the future of beer-drinking is rows of gleaming handles just waiting to be pulled whenever you want.

Using RFID and other fancy-shmancy tracking technologies, it can monitor your drinking down to 1/10th of an ounce, enabling easy sampling without paying for full pints. Plus bartenders get loads of juicy statistics on who's drinking what to fine-tune their offerings.

5 - Beer Shampoo

Hey, we had to plug ourselves in here somewhere, right? Beer is ridiculously good for your hair, and modern tech allows Duffy's Brew to combine the best stuff in beer with the best stuff in hair care. The result is hair that looks great and smells even better!

So try a bottle of Duffy's Brew. Your hair will thank you for it. Or at least it would, if it could talk.