I can't help but remember the story of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.<p>During their heyday, they made one of America's most popular beers. At the time there was a lot of interest in developing a faster fermentation process in an effort to make beer less expensive to produce. Schlitz got caught up in this - competition was fierce at the time - and ended up deciding to switch over to a continuous fermentation process and also started using extracts instead of more expensive traditional ingredients.<p>End result? The company was sunk within a decade. The new beer wasn't the same, and customers didn't like it. The flavor just wasn't there. That's really saying something when you're talking about an American-style adjunct lager, which isn't exactly the world's most full-flavored beer in the first place.<p>Which isn't to say that it's futile to try and come up with new processes for making fermented beverages. Companies like Miller and Anheuser-Busch have managed to figure out how to produce consistent, clean-tasting pale lagers in only a week or two where historically brewers would need to allow months of time for fermentation and cold conditioning. But they developed these processes incrementally. Attempts at radical, all-at-once re-envisioning of the processes for beer & winemaking seem to have a historical tendency to end up being radical failures.