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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 pic
by 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 agoEveryone'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 agoI always thought that the key was to mash with an appropriate volume of liquor (or 'water' for those that don't enjoy the brewing jargon): if you chuck all the liquor in (full-volume mashing I think it's called), the thin mash means that there's less contact between the enzymes and the starches which I would expect to result in a different chemical composition. Batch sparging on the other hand (following a mash with a regular ratio of liquor/grain - but rather than slowly rinsing the grains with sparge-temperature liquor, you fill your mash tun with your full volume of liquor at sparge temperature) may affect efficiency (positively or negatively), but shouldn't change the quality. I've enjoyed some fine batch-sparged beers! Oh and as for the OP's point about a beer taking three hours... I wish! For me it's more like 8 with all the cleaning and fiddling around in my tiny brewing space!
- keenar 12y agoI was listening to an episode of the Jamil show (A homebrew podcast) interviewing Annie Johnson, last years american homebrewer of the year and the brewmaster for PicoBrew. She creates recipes for the machine that users can download, as well as helping to qa / guide the product. She brought in samples from the machine to compare with samples that she brewed traditionally. The hosts (many of whom are respected BJCP judges) were blown away by the quality, and opined that this machine should be banned from brewing competitions because of the advantage it would confer. A link to the episode: http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/1068 http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/1068