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PicoBrew – Counter-top home brewing machine

142 points by cek 12y ago

RubberSoul 12y ago
I just started home brewing and I'm not sure I understand this product. "Hit brew and walk away" says USA Today. Why, that's almost as easy as simply buying beer! This kind of defeats the point of home brewing as a hobby :) It's not like there's a shortage of excellent commercial beer and we need a special machine to fill a gap in the market.
- CalRobert 12y ago
  For some people a lot of the appeal is saving money (beer can be ridiculously expensive where I live; just a bottle is often more than €3), and beer often tastes its best when fresh. Also, not everyone has access to excellent craft beers.
  - watty 12y ago
    I doubt people purchasing an $1,800 brew machine are doing so to save money.
    - mattmaroon 12y ago
      I doubt it too, but if you can save $1 a bottle I know a lot of people who'd recoup it in a year or two. My experience with homebrewing though is that it's not cheaper unless you drink much, much more than I do and don't value your time highly. This at least takes half of that out of the equation.
      - hyperbovine 12y ago
        > it's not cheaper unless you drink much, much more than I do and don't value your time highly. Well that explains its popularity in Portland then.
      - CalRobert 12y ago
        The time part of the equation is fuzzy. I happen to enjoy the act of homebrewing, so I slot it under "pleasant Sunday afternoon activities", which makes me not perceive the opportunity cost so much. I have friends who are unemployed and getting in to the hobby, and again, this is a country where a 6 pack of any halfway decent beer can easily be €15-€20, so brewing 25 litres of beer for about 5 hours of time and maybe €20 in grain, hops, yeast, and electricity is a pretty appealing notion.
      - CalRobert 12y ago
        But again - there's the variety. I moved to Ireland a couple years ago and discovered to my horror that while the microbrew scene here is good, there were no pumpkin beers and no double IPA's to be found. I dearly missed Arrogant Bastard as well. A boiler, a couple buckets, and a few crappy batches later, I finally had a decent AB-inspired recipe. (Kind of terrifying that the initials for Arrogant Bastard match Anheuser Busch). In many regards I prefer it; at 6.2% it's a little mellower and better as an after work beer, and I don't bottle it in bombers so opening one isn't such a commitment. Everyone's biased, but when I have friends over the stuff goes quickly so I figure that's reasonably indicative of quality.
- deleted 12y ago
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- fishtoaster 12y ago
  I think the idea is that you can customize the recipe. Based on the video, it looks like you can set everything about the mash temps, grain bill, hop schedule- everything you can do on a normal homebrewing setup, but with less time spent futzing with a burner trying to get your mash temp exactly right.
  - gt565k 12y ago
    arduino, $20 heating element, $10 relay switch and some PID programming and you can control the temperature too :)
- craigching 12y ago
  As someone who used to homebrew but had to quit when I had kids (due to time) this looks like something I could totally get into. I would miss the process, but the idea of getting a good beer without the time sink is very intriguing!
  - michael_h 12y ago
    I was in the same boat and a friend recommended that I scale down the operation to a single gallon at a time. The equipment is a little less unwieldy, so sanitizing time is reduced. The water gets to the right temperature much faster. Less grain == less sparging time. The boil volume is a bit over a gallon, which is easily contained in a modest sized pot, so boil-overs are almost a non-concern. I let the grains steep and then start the bath routine and read books. After that, sparge and start the boil. I can get an all grain batch made on a Tuesday evening. Plus, the smaller batch sizes let you experiment and you won't be saddled with the 5 gallons of terrible oktoberfest in my basement.
    - fishtoaster 12y ago
      I just made this switch myself. My new tiny SF apartment makes 5-gallon batches impractical, so I brewed my first 1-gallon batch yesterday. I'll see how the results are in a month, but right now I can say that the process is way easier: - Equipment mostly fits in my dishwasher - Moving/pouring 1 gallon of liquid is faster, easier, and results in less spillage than 5 gallons - No need for a wort chiller, since an ice bath is more than effective enough for a 1-gallon batch - Fermentation control will be a lot cheaper, since a small dorm fridge will fit the fermenter - As you pointed out: more experimentation because the cost of failure is much lower
      - craigching 12y ago
        Do you do all-grain? Or extracts? If all-grain, how are you mashing?
    - craigching 12y ago
      How are you doing your mashes? EDIT: Just for clarification, just before my first daughter was born I was doing 15 gallon boils with a converted cooler for a mash tun. It was so much fun! But the time to do all that and cleanup (as you know, cleaning is THE most important part of course and a significant slice of the time) was pretty much a whole Saturday morning and afternoon, prime kid time.
- pkulak 12y ago
  I dunno. I have a bread machine and I love it. Even though there are plenty of great bakeries in my city.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    Exactly. I have a grocery store in my town. It's still fun to make my own bread. I have a friend who roasts his own coffee for similar reasons.
  - radiorental 12y ago
    As someone who does both, there is a world of difference between the two processes. The argument being made against the picobrew is that it takes away exactly the thing a significant portion of the home brewing community enjoys: 1)The skill required to differentiate between a good and great, reproducible, beer 2)Sharing said beer and knowing it was something you created, as opposed you just 'made'. There's a depth and risk of failure to brewing that is simply not there with baking bread.
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      Yes, but bread-machine bread is f-ing horrible compared to the real stuff. I assume that picobrew at least produces good beer.
    - leoedin 12y ago
      I think perhaps you're viewing this from the wrong direction. This device isn't aimed at people who love the home-brew process. They aren't going to buy a device which reduces their enjoyment. Likewise there's many people who love baking, and wouldn't dream of using a bread maker. The device is aimed at people who maybe enjoy the idea of brewing beer, but not the practical (and complicated) steps required. Something like this device isn't so much aimed at the existing homebrew market, but designed to create a new market. I think the bread maker analogy is a really good one. I'd consider buying a bread maker precisely because I don't particularly enjoy the drawn out process of baking bread, but I do enjoy both having freshly baked bread and being able to make bread with the stuff I like in it.
  - 12y ago
- scottlocklin 12y ago
  I guess it's like a first generation breadmaker. Home brewed beer can be awful, but when it comes out right, it's worlds apart from anything you can buy in a grocery store.
  - dpark 12y ago
    Your grocery store must have a terrible selection of beer. I home brew because I enjoy it. I'm under no delusions that my beers will ever be significantly better than the best I can buy in a store. The idea that the hobbyist will in general produce a far better product than an industry of passionate experts is kind of ridiculous.
    - scottlocklin 12y ago
      Hey, now; either my grocery store sucks, or I am/was a dang good home brewer. Seriously; when it came out well (2/3 batches), the only thing that could compete with it was straight from the microbrewery tap. Never could make a decent lager, but for any kind of ale, it was great. I blame freshness, which is an under appreciated beer quality. Also, lack of the now popular practice of overhopping; almost everything in the store these days seems to be an IPA or overhopped porter.
      - sitkack 12y ago
        The best part of home brewing is making the beer you want. Years ago I perfected a honey chamomile kolsch. That beer was for me, no one else.
        scottlocklin 12y ago
        My favorite quasi-invention: beer with a small serrano pepper added to each bottle. It didn't age well (it eventually turned into beery hot sauce), but it was delicious for the first few weeks.
        sitkack 12y ago
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  Ive been home brewing for about 8 years now and have wanted this thing for a while. No big mess, no overboiling, clean-up is easy, kegging immediately. Awesome I didn't get into homebrewing so I could spend all my time cleaning, and this would cut down on that significantly.
  - mattmaroon 12y ago
    Are you doing full grain or malt extract? I bet this thing requires cleaning on the order of brewing from extract. Also if you're doing full grain and want to reduce headache and clean up and equipment costs, check out brew in a bag. (Not the cheesy thing they sell at Wal-Mart around Christmas.) I haven't done it yet but from the reviews I've read and videos I've watched it seems like a greatly simplified method.
    - winslow 12y ago
      Brew in a bag (BIAB) is a great way to start testing the all grain method with very little money investment. Grab a paint strainer bag from home depot pack of two for $5 and away you go.
    - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
      I have always done full grain. The bags don't get good conversion yields in my opinion cause the grain really only gets good exposure around the outside. I have seen/had a few of my friends' extract brews and I agree they are much simpler, in some cases the beers were about on par too.
      - CalRobert 12y ago
        BIAB does have lower efficiency, but having less stuff around the apartment makes it worthwhile. Using some extra grain is a bummer, but not a terrible tradeoff.
    - lukencode 12y ago
      Lots of Australian home brewers (me included) will do brew in a bag then no chill. Saves time, equipment and water and still makes a cracking beer.
- teach 12y ago
  "It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply and the case the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera, go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those there were a thousand people that couldn't do that, but wanted to mess around with programming - software hobbyists." -- Steve Jobs on the Apple II
  - sitkack 12y ago
    Doesn't compare. The LoE for brewing beer and this machine are on the same order of magnitude.
    - teach 12y ago
      I strongly disagree. I've been homebrewing all-grain batches for about six years. My typical brewday takes about nine hours and involves four distinct vessels. There's a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of cleaning. This machine would make better beer, more consistently, and with a lot less effort.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  I don't think anyone plans to use it to brew more Bud Light with.
- debaserab2 12y ago
  Not at all. It allows you to concentrate more on the recipe and less on the technique. I've homebrewed for years and my biggest complaint has always been it's damn near impossible for me to make the same beer twice. There are so many variables in the brewing process itself that are hard to control (probably the biggest being temperature). Even with a very tight process it's likely that you're going to get some variance that will affect fermentation. This appliance removes a lot of variance.
  - gt565k 12y ago
    Use a microcontroller to manage the heating element and couple that with a PID to hit your target temperature. I can give you some tips on how to do it, although tuning PIDs can be somewhat time consuming...
rjf1331 12y ago
I've pre-ordered a Brewbot (http://www.brewbot.io/ http://www.brewbot.io/) and can't wait for it to arrive. This one looks cool too, but a bit less customization potential.
chrisBob 12y ago
Brews in an average of 4 hours? Can that be right?
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Sounds about right, if slightly optimistic; 90 minute mash, 60-90 minute boil, and cooling. Of course, the fermentation is a matter of weeks, not hours.
- chadzero 12y ago
  Plus a few weeks to ferment.
  - zwieback 12y ago
    Plus refrigerated lagering, if you want real beer.
    - craigching 12y ago
      Prefer ales myself ;) Especially real ales from England!
- slipperyp 12y ago
  Yeah, but this isn't to produce a drinkable brew. It's not even a super different projection from the brew time when I've homebrewed (which has been a while but was probably closer to 6 hours for me to get it into the primary fermentation tub). This thing looks pretty cool, but I'm interested in seeing more on the whole setup / maintenance and, especially, cleaning.
darkstar999 12y ago
You could have an extremely nice, _real_ brewing setup for less than $1800, including separate refrigeration for fermenting and serving. Not sure what demographic this serves.
- misuba 12y ago
  People who have more money to trade than time.
  - jack-r-abbit 12y ago
    And people with less space to store the equipment.
  - VLM 12y ago
    BaaS Brew as a Service? My local homebrewer store offers classes at $10/hr so figure for $50/hr you could trivially make an arrangement. Something "uber"-ish where you rent a non-store employee's time would be interesting. May as well have the rented brewer provide his own worm (do they still call them that? The giant copper cooling coil to bring the wort from steep to room temp in an instant using a garden hose?) and other bulky expensive one time only stuff. I was "drafted" to help some friends on their first beer brew because they knew I was a wine maker, everything went well other than beer is more complicated than I like. Also some winemaker weirdness/hangups about oxidation falls on deaf ears when you drink the stuff mere weeks later, so that was a little weird. Someone who actually knows how to brew could probably make some money if there was only a way to organize the process of match making wanna be beer brewers with real experienced beer brewers. It would be nice and difficult to background check the contractors and verify their skills (both brewing skills and some minimal level of customer service), and scheduling and billing and customer sat tracking... Sounds like a perfect startup opportunity! Of course, long term growth might be a bit limited compared to "disrupt taxis" or whatever.
    - bradleyjg 12y ago
      That's a pretty good idea. The actual mechanics of brewing beer are exacting and tedious, but have little room for creativity. The most creative part of the endeavor is the recipe. In fact, many commercial microbrews are partly or wholly made by contract brewers, so this already exists at a larger scale. The downside is the legal red tape for anything involving alcohol, particularly anything interstate. Edit: thank you darkstar999, that was a typo
cek 12y ago
My first (and only) home brew experience was with a "bag o beer". You put everything in a bag and let it sit for a few weeks. Well, the bag had a plastic cap on the end. I had it set on the floor of the garage, kinda out of the way. About a week in, I discovered that it was not REALLY out of the way because I clipped that cap with my shoe as I waked by. The cap broke off and beer proceeded to spray ALL OVER MY GARAGE. Ceiling, walls, everywhere. We never got the smell of beer out of the garage...I wonder if the people living there can still smell it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
dark_night_tim 12y ago
I might buy one just for fun if it costs less than 500 bucks...
- QuotedForTruth 12y ago
  Check the store part. $1799
Dirlewanger 12y ago
Hmmm, $1800? I know not of all the apparatuses needed for homebrewing. I'm guessing it's substantially less than this? One would obviously be paying for the convenience of this machine and its ability to brew extremely small batches. Regardless, I just can't see this "catching on" to any degree with that price. Do they have plans to scale or something?
- jbondeson 12y ago
  Depends. For extract brewing you can easily do it for $100-150 if you bottle the beer(with your biggest expense being a large 5+ gallon kettle), adding another $100-150 if you keg. Full grain brewing is significantly more expensive (unless you do the "Brew in a Bag" style) simple setups easily put you into the $400+ range. Purpose-built full grain brewing systems setup with pumps, three burners and kettles will set you back $2500-5000 depending upon how nice of a setup you get and the volume (15 gallons to 40 gallons), and that doesn't even include the fermentation equipment which for heated and cooled conicals can be $2000+. Homebrewing has a very active higher end market which is only getting more active as it becomes easier for individuals to move from hobbyist to professional pico/nano/micro-brewer.
  - rickr 12y ago
    All grain isn't that much more expensive. All you need to step up to a full all grain setup is an igloo cooler and a false bottom - ~$100 USD worth of gear. If you're batch sparging you can use your boil kettle to heat strike, then sparge water. You just need an extra vessel for the first runnings.
    - jbondeson 12y ago
      Sure, if you really skimp you can do stuff fairly cheap, but if you don't want to go insane with all the juggling you're generally looking at two kettles, and an igloo. They do sell some setups with two igloo's, but then when you're sparging you are either doing batch sparging (which can be a bit tricky to keep the temps right) or you're doing a mash out with water from a separate smaller kettle. Brewing can certainly be done on the cheap if money is more constrained than time and effort. And there are definitely no shortage of creative ways people have devised to save some money.
smoyer 12y ago
I was disappointed that it wasn't brewing coffee!
maillota 12y ago
Went in on one of these with some friends and we've done 3 brews so far with it (nothing is drinkable yet). Prior to getting the machine, we did a few brews the traditional way to better understand the process. In terms of the amount of time to brew, the biggest difference with the PicoBrew and traditional methods is that during the process we don't have to constantly monitor and adjust, the machine does that for us. Some of the cleaning is simpler since most of the PicoBrew parts are dishwasher safe, but the kegs still need to be cleaned, bottles prepped, etc... The thing we're most excited about is that the high-degree of control and repeatability means that we can tweak small things and know that the rest of the process remains consistent.
amorphic 12y ago
For any home brewers who might be interested I maintain braubuddy, a temperature control framework written in Python: http://braubuddy.org/ http://braubuddy.org/ It was written to scratch my own itch - I use it to maintain fermentation temperature within a certain range. Especially useful for lagers or brewing ales in the fridge in the Summertime. It'll also publish metrics to a variety of outputs, with the next release to support Twitter, Librato, and Hosted Graphite.
gt565k 12y ago
Meh... As someone who worked on a counter-top beer brewing appliance for my senior design project, I can tell you this thing doesn't produce good beer. The picobrew is spargeless and is also a single-vessel system which does not stay true to the traditional beer brewing process, meaning the quality of the beer is significantly lowered. Not to mention half the fun of brewing beer is being involved in the process itself. Adding hops and other ingredients when necessary and being creative by introducing your own ingredients into the process. When we worked on our senior design project, our market research told us exactly that. People want to be involved in the beer brewing process. Another issue we had was the volume of the yield. With a counter top appliance, you can only get so much power out of a single wall outlet/socket, so your heating element is limited as to the amount of volume of water it can actually heat. Brewing beer generally takes about 3 hours, so people tend to brew more than 2-3 gallons. The picobrew's yield is 9.4 liters (2.5 gallons), and it is also spargeless and single-vessel so its target market isn't really people who like brewing beer. It's people who've never brewed beer, and are just going to buy a flashy toy which will rarely get used. We build an interactive android application that communicated with a netduino microncontroller through a web server. This allowed us to query the microcontroller, which controlled the heating element, water pump, and temperature + float sensors. All I'm saying is, if a few Georgia Tech undergrads can build a counter-top brewing appliance, someone who does this as a hobby and has some programming experience, could just as easily build a larger scale brewing device with a netduino/arduino microcontroller, a few relays and some sensors. You can see an automated run of our prototype here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mttrd7mGvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mttrd7mGvI and a small splash page that gives a general overview of the components used here http://brewmasters.herokuapp.com/brewery http://brewmasters.herokuapp.com/brewery
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Everyone's taste is different, of course, but I've had non-sparge beers that I thought were great. My understanding was that a sparge increased efficiency; are you saying that the sparge results in a different chemical composition? Of course, if you sparge with different temp water that would make a difference, but how is that different from a step mash with no sparge?
chickenboot 12y ago
I'm surprised there isn't mention of the Spiedels Braumeister [1] - it seems to be a similar product (albeit with less tech, and possibly a bit more manual work). I've heard lots of good things about them, but the price has always put me off, though it is comparable to the PicoBrew, at least here in the UK. I think they require a bit more interaction if you want to sparge (from my cursory internet forum research performed just now [2]) but at least you can (batch) sparge, and create recipes that would scale up to your big rig if you desired (and had a big rig and space etc). [1] http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.html http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.h... [2] http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249 http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249

142 points by cek 12y ago

I just started home brewing and I'm not sure I understand this product. "Hit brew and walk away" says USA Today. Why, that's almost as easy as simply buying beer! This kind of defeats the point of home brewing as a hobby :) It's not like there's a shortage of excellent commercial beer and we need a special machine to fill a gap in the market.

CalRobert 12y ago
For some people a lot of the appeal is saving money (beer can be ridiculously expensive where I live; just a bottle is often more than €3), and beer often tastes its best when fresh. Also, not everyone has access to excellent craft beers.
- watty 12y ago
  I doubt people purchasing an $1,800 brew machine are doing so to save money.
  - mattmaroon 12y ago
    I doubt it too, but if you can save $1 a bottle I know a lot of people who'd recoup it in a year or two. My experience with homebrewing though is that it's not cheaper unless you drink much, much more than I do and don't value your time highly. This at least takes half of that out of the equation.
    - hyperbovine 12y ago
      > it's not cheaper unless you drink much, much more than I do and don't value your time highly. Well that explains its popularity in Portland then.
    - CalRobert 12y ago
      The time part of the equation is fuzzy. I happen to enjoy the act of homebrewing, so I slot it under "pleasant Sunday afternoon activities", which makes me not perceive the opportunity cost so much. I have friends who are unemployed and getting in to the hobby, and again, this is a country where a 6 pack of any halfway decent beer can easily be €15-€20, so brewing 25 litres of beer for about 5 hours of time and maybe €20 in grain, hops, yeast, and electricity is a pretty appealing notion.
    - CalRobert 12y ago
      But again - there's the variety. I moved to Ireland a couple years ago and discovered to my horror that while the microbrew scene here is good, there were no pumpkin beers and no double IPA's to be found. I dearly missed Arrogant Bastard as well. A boiler, a couple buckets, and a few crappy batches later, I finally had a decent AB-inspired recipe. (Kind of terrifying that the initials for Arrogant Bastard match Anheuser Busch). In many regards I prefer it; at 6.2% it's a little mellower and better as an after work beer, and I don't bottle it in bombers so opening one isn't such a commitment. Everyone's biased, but when I have friends over the stuff goes quickly so I figure that's reasonably indicative of quality.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
fishtoaster 12y ago
I think the idea is that you can customize the recipe. Based on the video, it looks like you can set everything about the mash temps, grain bill, hop schedule- everything you can do on a normal homebrewing setup, but with less time spent futzing with a burner trying to get your mash temp exactly right.
- gt565k 12y ago
  arduino, $20 heating element, $10 relay switch and some PID programming and you can control the temperature too :)
craigching 12y ago
As someone who used to homebrew but had to quit when I had kids (due to time) this looks like something I could totally get into. I would miss the process, but the idea of getting a good beer without the time sink is very intriguing!
- michael_h 12y ago
  I was in the same boat and a friend recommended that I scale down the operation to a single gallon at a time. The equipment is a little less unwieldy, so sanitizing time is reduced. The water gets to the right temperature much faster. Less grain == less sparging time. The boil volume is a bit over a gallon, which is easily contained in a modest sized pot, so boil-overs are almost a non-concern. I let the grains steep and then start the bath routine and read books. After that, sparge and start the boil. I can get an all grain batch made on a Tuesday evening. Plus, the smaller batch sizes let you experiment and you won't be saddled with the 5 gallons of terrible oktoberfest in my basement.
  - fishtoaster 12y ago
    I just made this switch myself. My new tiny SF apartment makes 5-gallon batches impractical, so I brewed my first 1-gallon batch yesterday. I'll see how the results are in a month, but right now I can say that the process is way easier: - Equipment mostly fits in my dishwasher - Moving/pouring 1 gallon of liquid is faster, easier, and results in less spillage than 5 gallons - No need for a wort chiller, since an ice bath is more than effective enough for a 1-gallon batch - Fermentation control will be a lot cheaper, since a small dorm fridge will fit the fermenter - As you pointed out: more experimentation because the cost of failure is much lower
    - craigching 12y ago
      Do you do all-grain? Or extracts? If all-grain, how are you mashing?
  - craigching 12y ago
    How are you doing your mashes? EDIT: Just for clarification, just before my first daughter was born I was doing 15 gallon boils with a converted cooler for a mash tun. It was so much fun! But the time to do all that and cleanup (as you know, cleaning is THE most important part of course and a significant slice of the time) was pretty much a whole Saturday morning and afternoon, prime kid time.
pkulak 12y ago
I dunno. I have a bread machine and I love it. Even though there are plenty of great bakeries in my city.
- Kalium 12y ago
  Exactly. I have a grocery store in my town. It's still fun to make my own bread. I have a friend who roasts his own coffee for similar reasons.
- radiorental 12y ago
  As someone who does both, there is a world of difference between the two processes. The argument being made against the picobrew is that it takes away exactly the thing a significant portion of the home brewing community enjoys: 1)The skill required to differentiate between a good and great, reproducible, beer 2)Sharing said beer and knowing it was something you created, as opposed you just 'made'. There's a depth and risk of failure to brewing that is simply not there with baking bread.
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    Yes, but bread-machine bread is f-ing horrible compared to the real stuff. I assume that picobrew at least produces good beer.
  - leoedin 12y ago
    I think perhaps you're viewing this from the wrong direction. This device isn't aimed at people who love the home-brew process. They aren't going to buy a device which reduces their enjoyment. Likewise there's many people who love baking, and wouldn't dream of using a bread maker. The device is aimed at people who maybe enjoy the idea of brewing beer, but not the practical (and complicated) steps required. Something like this device isn't so much aimed at the existing homebrew market, but designed to create a new market. I think the bread maker analogy is a really good one. I'd consider buying a bread maker precisely because I don't particularly enjoy the drawn out process of baking bread, but I do enjoy both having freshly baked bread and being able to make bread with the stuff I like in it.
- 12y ago
scottlocklin 12y ago
I guess it's like a first generation breadmaker. Home brewed beer can be awful, but when it comes out right, it's worlds apart from anything you can buy in a grocery store.
- dpark 12y ago
  Your grocery store must have a terrible selection of beer. I home brew because I enjoy it. I'm under no delusions that my beers will ever be significantly better than the best I can buy in a store. The idea that the hobbyist will in general produce a far better product than an industry of passionate experts is kind of ridiculous.
  - scottlocklin 12y ago
    Hey, now; either my grocery store sucks, or I am/was a dang good home brewer. Seriously; when it came out well (2/3 batches), the only thing that could compete with it was straight from the microbrewery tap. Never could make a decent lager, but for any kind of ale, it was great. I blame freshness, which is an under appreciated beer quality. Also, lack of the now popular practice of overhopping; almost everything in the store these days seems to be an IPA or overhopped porter.
    - sitkack 12y ago
      The best part of home brewing is making the beer you want. Years ago I perfected a honey chamomile kolsch. That beer was for me, no one else.
      - scottlocklin 12y ago
        My favorite quasi-invention: beer with a small serrano pepper added to each bottle. It didn't age well (it eventually turned into beery hot sauce), but it was delicious for the first few weeks.
        sitkack 12y ago
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Ive been home brewing for about 8 years now and have wanted this thing for a while. No big mess, no overboiling, clean-up is easy, kegging immediately. Awesome I didn't get into homebrewing so I could spend all my time cleaning, and this would cut down on that significantly.
- mattmaroon 12y ago
  Are you doing full grain or malt extract? I bet this thing requires cleaning on the order of brewing from extract. Also if you're doing full grain and want to reduce headache and clean up and equipment costs, check out brew in a bag. (Not the cheesy thing they sell at Wal-Mart around Christmas.) I haven't done it yet but from the reviews I've read and videos I've watched it seems like a greatly simplified method.
  - winslow 12y ago
    Brew in a bag (BIAB) is a great way to start testing the all grain method with very little money investment. Grab a paint strainer bag from home depot pack of two for $5 and away you go.
  - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
    I have always done full grain. The bags don't get good conversion yields in my opinion cause the grain really only gets good exposure around the outside. I have seen/had a few of my friends' extract brews and I agree they are much simpler, in some cases the beers were about on par too.
    - CalRobert 12y ago
      BIAB does have lower efficiency, but having less stuff around the apartment makes it worthwhile. Using some extra grain is a bummer, but not a terrible tradeoff.
  - lukencode 12y ago
    Lots of Australian home brewers (me included) will do brew in a bag then no chill. Saves time, equipment and water and still makes a cracking beer.
teach 12y ago
"It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply and the case the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera, go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those there were a thousand people that couldn't do that, but wanted to mess around with programming - software hobbyists." -- Steve Jobs on the Apple II
- sitkack 12y ago
  Doesn't compare. The LoE for brewing beer and this machine are on the same order of magnitude.
  - teach 12y ago
    I strongly disagree. I've been homebrewing all-grain batches for about six years. My typical brewday takes about nine hours and involves four distinct vessels. There's a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of cleaning. This machine would make better beer, more consistently, and with a lot less effort.
fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
I don't think anyone plans to use it to brew more Bud Light with.
debaserab2 12y ago
Not at all. It allows you to concentrate more on the recipe and less on the technique. I've homebrewed for years and my biggest complaint has always been it's damn near impossible for me to make the same beer twice. There are so many variables in the brewing process itself that are hard to control (probably the biggest being temperature). Even with a very tight process it's likely that you're going to get some variance that will affect fermentation. This appliance removes a lot of variance.
- gt565k 12y ago
  Use a microcontroller to manage the heating element and couple that with a PID to hit your target temperature. I can give you some tips on how to do it, although tuning PIDs can be somewhat time consuming...

rjf1331 12y ago

I've pre-ordered a Brewbot (http://www.brewbot.io/ http://www.brewbot.io/) and can't wait for it to arrive. This one looks cool too, but a bit less customization potential.

chrisBob 12y ago

Brews in an average of 4 hours? Can that be right?

CalRobert 12y ago
Sounds about right, if slightly optimistic; 90 minute mash, 60-90 minute boil, and cooling. Of course, the fermentation is a matter of weeks, not hours.
chadzero 12y ago
Plus a few weeks to ferment.
- zwieback 12y ago
  Plus refrigerated lagering, if you want real beer.
  - craigching 12y ago
    Prefer ales myself ;) Especially real ales from England!
slipperyp 12y ago
Yeah, but this isn't to produce a drinkable brew. It's not even a super different projection from the brew time when I've homebrewed (which has been a while but was probably closer to 6 hours for me to get it into the primary fermentation tub). This thing looks pretty cool, but I'm interested in seeing more on the whole setup / maintenance and, especially, cleaning.

darkstar999 12y ago

You could have an extremely nice, _real_ brewing setup for less than $1800, including separate refrigeration for fermenting and serving. Not sure what demographic this serves.

misuba 12y ago
People who have more money to trade than time.
- jack-r-abbit 12y ago
  And people with less space to store the equipment.
- VLM 12y ago
  BaaS Brew as a Service? My local homebrewer store offers classes at $10/hr so figure for $50/hr you could trivially make an arrangement. Something "uber"-ish where you rent a non-store employee's time would be interesting. May as well have the rented brewer provide his own worm (do they still call them that? The giant copper cooling coil to bring the wort from steep to room temp in an instant using a garden hose?) and other bulky expensive one time only stuff. I was "drafted" to help some friends on their first beer brew because they knew I was a wine maker, everything went well other than beer is more complicated than I like. Also some winemaker weirdness/hangups about oxidation falls on deaf ears when you drink the stuff mere weeks later, so that was a little weird. Someone who actually knows how to brew could probably make some money if there was only a way to organize the process of match making wanna be beer brewers with real experienced beer brewers. It would be nice and difficult to background check the contractors and verify their skills (both brewing skills and some minimal level of customer service), and scheduling and billing and customer sat tracking... Sounds like a perfect startup opportunity! Of course, long term growth might be a bit limited compared to "disrupt taxis" or whatever.
  - bradleyjg 12y ago
    That's a pretty good idea. The actual mechanics of brewing beer are exacting and tedious, but have little room for creativity. The most creative part of the endeavor is the recipe. In fact, many commercial microbrews are partly or wholly made by contract brewers, so this already exists at a larger scale. The downside is the legal red tape for anything involving alcohol, particularly anything interstate. Edit: thank you darkstar999, that was a typo

cek 12y ago

My first (and only) home brew experience was with a "bag o beer". You put everything in a bag and let it sit for a few weeks. Well, the bag had a plastic cap on the end. I had it set on the floor of the garage, kinda out of the way. About a week in, I discovered that it was not REALLY out of the way because I clipped that cap with my shoe as I waked by. The cap broke off and beer proceeded to spray ALL OVER MY GARAGE. Ceiling, walls, everywhere. We never got the smell of beer out of the garage...I wonder if the people living there can still smell it.

deleted 12y ago
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dark_night_tim 12y ago

I might buy one just for fun if it costs less than 500 bucks...

QuotedForTruth 12y ago
Check the store part. $1799

Dirlewanger 12y ago

Hmmm, $1800? I know not of all the apparatuses needed for homebrewing. I'm guessing it's substantially less than this? One would obviously be paying for the convenience of this machine and its ability to brew extremely small batches. Regardless, I just can't see this "catching on" to any degree with that price. Do they have plans to scale or something?

jbondeson 12y ago
Depends. For extract brewing you can easily do it for $100-150 if you bottle the beer(with your biggest expense being a large 5+ gallon kettle), adding another $100-150 if you keg. Full grain brewing is significantly more expensive (unless you do the "Brew in a Bag" style) simple setups easily put you into the $400+ range. Purpose-built full grain brewing systems setup with pumps, three burners and kettles will set you back $2500-5000 depending upon how nice of a setup you get and the volume (15 gallons to 40 gallons), and that doesn't even include the fermentation equipment which for heated and cooled conicals can be $2000+. Homebrewing has a very active higher end market which is only getting more active as it becomes easier for individuals to move from hobbyist to professional pico/nano/micro-brewer.
- rickr 12y ago
  All grain isn't that much more expensive. All you need to step up to a full all grain setup is an igloo cooler and a false bottom - ~$100 USD worth of gear. If you're batch sparging you can use your boil kettle to heat strike, then sparge water. You just need an extra vessel for the first runnings.
  - jbondeson 12y ago
    Sure, if you really skimp you can do stuff fairly cheap, but if you don't want to go insane with all the juggling you're generally looking at two kettles, and an igloo. They do sell some setups with two igloo's, but then when you're sparging you are either doing batch sparging (which can be a bit tricky to keep the temps right) or you're doing a mash out with water from a separate smaller kettle. Brewing can certainly be done on the cheap if money is more constrained than time and effort. And there are definitely no shortage of creative ways people have devised to save some money.

smoyer 12y ago

I was disappointed that it wasn't brewing coffee!

maillota 12y ago

Went in on one of these with some friends and we've done 3 brews so far with it (nothing is drinkable yet). Prior to getting the machine, we did a few brews the traditional way to better understand the process. In terms of the amount of time to brew, the biggest difference with the PicoBrew and traditional methods is that during the process we don't have to constantly monitor and adjust, the machine does that for us. Some of the cleaning is simpler since most of the PicoBrew parts are dishwasher safe, but the kegs still need to be cleaned, bottles prepped, etc... The thing we're most excited about is that the high-degree of control and repeatability means that we can tweak small things and know that the rest of the process remains consistent.

amorphic 12y ago

For any home brewers who might be interested I maintain braubuddy, a temperature control framework written in Python: http://braubuddy.org/ http://braubuddy.org/ It was written to scratch my own itch - I use it to maintain fermentation temperature within a certain range. Especially useful for lagers or brewing ales in the fridge in the Summertime. It'll also publish metrics to a variety of outputs, with the next release to support Twitter, Librato, and Hosted Graphite.

gt565k 12y ago

Meh... As someone who worked on a counter-top beer brewing appliance for my senior design project, I can tell you this thing doesn't produce good beer. The picobrew is spargeless and is also a single-vessel system which does not stay true to the traditional beer brewing process, meaning the quality of the beer is significantly lowered. Not to mention half the fun of brewing beer is being involved in the process itself. Adding hops and other ingredients when necessary and being creative by introducing your own ingredients into the process. When we worked on our senior design project, our market research told us exactly that. People want to be involved in the beer brewing process. Another issue we had was the volume of the yield. With a counter top appliance, you can only get so much power out of a single wall outlet/socket, so your heating element is limited as to the amount of volume of water it can actually heat. Brewing beer generally takes about 3 hours, so people tend to brew more than 2-3 gallons. The picobrew's yield is 9.4 liters (2.5 gallons), and it is also spargeless and single-vessel so its target market isn't really people who like brewing beer. It's people who've never brewed beer, and are just going to buy a flashy toy which will rarely get used. We build an interactive android application that communicated with a netduino microncontroller through a web server. This allowed us to query the microcontroller, which controlled the heating element, water pump, and temperature + float sensors. All I'm saying is, if a few Georgia Tech undergrads can build a counter-top brewing appliance, someone who does this as a hobby and has some programming experience, could just as easily build a larger scale brewing device with a netduino/arduino microcontroller, a few relays and some sensors. You can see an automated run of our prototype here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mttrd7mGvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mttrd7mGvI and a small splash page that gives a general overview of the components used here http://brewmasters.herokuapp.com/brewery http://brewmasters.herokuapp.com/brewery

CalRobert 12y ago
Everyone's taste is different, of course, but I've had non-sparge beers that I thought were great. My understanding was that a sparge increased efficiency; are you saying that the sparge results in a different chemical composition? Of course, if you sparge with different temp water that would make a difference, but how is that different from a step mash with no sparge?

chickenboot 12y ago

I'm surprised there isn't mention of the Spiedels Braumeister [1] - it seems to be a similar product (albeit with less tech, and possibly a bit more manual work). I've heard lots of good things about them, but the price has always put me off, though it is comparable to the PicoBrew, at least here in the UK. I think they require a bit more interaction if you want to sparge (from my cursory internet forum research performed just now [2]) but at least you can (batch) sparge, and create recipes that would scale up to your big rig if you desired (and had a big rig and space etc). [1] http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.html http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.h... [2] http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249 http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249