This study was conducted to produce rice malt suitable for beer brewing. An all-rice beer would be particularly appealing to individuals with celiac disease because rice does not contain gluten proteins. Furthermore, rice malt could also contribute to new beer flavors and brands. A screening of 10 rice varieties was conducted. The varieties Balilla and Centauro were found to be suitable for the production of an all-rice malt beer without the need of exogenous enzymes. They were characterized by a low diastatic power but nevertheless they saccharified well, likely due to other endogenous amylolytic enzymes such as limit dextrinase and α-glucosidase. The addition of CaCl2 and lactic acid during mashing lowered the pH value and increased saccharification. However, the Balilla variety saccharified without the need of these additives. We also show that the soluble nitrogen and free amino nitrogen content of rice malt wort can be increased by the incorporation of the acrospires and rootlets during mashing.

This paper presents an integrated microsystem for tracing food information and monitoring its preservation conditions. The system embeds humidity, temperature, and light intensity sensors with the respective interface circuits and also an A/D converter. The target application of the microsystem is a smart label, which will include an RFID transponder for collecting energy and transmitting data, as well as a microbattery for energy storage. The proposed microsystem, designed in a 0.18µm CMOS technology, achieves better than 0.5°C and 6W/m 2 accuracy regarding temperature and light intensity respectively, while consuming less than 90µA with 1.8V supply. On-chip capacitor dielectric permittivity, based on Sylgarl 184 polymer, has been optimized for best relative humidity response at ambient temperature for the given microsystem.

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This chapter is about the design and experimental characterization of an integrated prototype for tracing food preservation quality along the distribution chain by monitoring its environmental preservation conditions. The system includes humidity, temperature, and light intensity sensors with the respective interface circuits and an A/D converter. The target application of the microsystem is a smart tag including an RFID transponder for collecting energy and transmitting data, as well as a micro-battery for energy storage. The developed microsystem has been fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology and achieves better than 0.5 °C and 6 W/m 2 accuracy for temperature and light intensity respectively, while nominally consuming less than 1 μA at 1.8 V supply. Chemical on-chip capacitor dielectric composition, based on Sylgarl 184 polymer, is being optimized for maximum sensitivity response in terms of permittivity with respect to air relative humidity, while further investigation about correlation between real food samples preservation and measured environmental parameters exposure history is being carried out.

In this work, storage environment and food preservation quality parameters of a specific kind of sample (Emmental sliced cheese) were monitored for 32 days under four different storage conditions thanks to the development of a dedicated multisensor smart tag. Dry matter, pH value, colour index, and water activity, have been analyzed to estimate the quality of preservation of the food samples over time. Furthermore, the long-term reliability and performance of the ad-hoc developed fullyintegrated smart label system for food tracing has been validated. The low-power multi-sensor integrated circuit, employed to continuously monitor the conservation parameters for the sliced cheese samples, has been fabricated in 0.18 µm CMOS technology, and includes temperature, light intensity and optional humidity sensors with the respective interface circuits and a common A/D converter. Collected sensors data have been then studied together with physical and chemical analyses to find correlations between the conservation quality of food samples and the collected environmental data history.