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Tech

What Is a Brewery Doing at CES?

You can’t have beer without clean water.
Image: Nicholas Deleon

I did not expect to find the brewery Shock Top at CES 2016, but here we are.

Shock Top told me at a Tuesday evening event called Digital Experience that it wanted to help raise consumer awareness of water conservation efforts. (Incidentally, if you're interested in the history of the Southwest and how it's been made habitable for such a large population, then read this book.) Part of the company's efforts is a program called Shock the Drought, which highlights gadgets and other inventions that might help encourage everyday people to conserve water, particularly those in California where Shock Top is brewed.

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That brings us to Droppler, an Indiegogo project, launched on Wednesday morning, that uses Shazam-like audio recognition to "hear" how much water you're wasting.

"With Droppler, you place it next to a kitchen sink, a shower, or a faucet and a microphone records the sound of the running water," said Nascent Objects Founder and CEO Baback Elmieh. An easily visible indicator on the device then lets users know how much water the adjacent sink, shower, or faucet has used. "It's the most advanced egg timer you've ever seen in your life."

Droppler's underlying technology goes back two years, Elmieh said, while the device itself has been in development for about six months.

"When we talked to users they told us that one of the biggest barriers to installing a water conservation device was just the plumbing that's required," said Elmieh. "This solves that."

And while you'd naturally expect the CEO of a company to hype his own products (this is CES, after all), the obvious question is: Does it actually work? Unfortunately, there was no nearby sink at the Tuesday evening demo booth to see the device in action, so the above YouTube video being the only evidence we have so far that the technology checks out.

Let's assume Droppler works as advertised. There's still the question of whether or not the average consumer cares enough to spring for any sort of water conservation device, even if it doesn't require a visit from the plumber. Studies have shown that people aren't all that great at recognizing where they can conserve the most water, and perhaps Droppler could help.

In any case, California residents missed state-mandated water conservation targets in October 2015 and November 2015. State officials now hopeful that El Niño-induced storms will help reverse the effects of the four-year drought.