
PicoBrew – Counter-top home brewing machine - cek
http://picobrew.com/
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RubberSoul
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.

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pkulak
I dunno. I have a bread machine and I love it. Even though there are plenty of
great bakeries in my city.

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radiorental
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.

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leoedin
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.

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maillota
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.

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rjf1331
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.

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gt565k
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)

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CalRobert
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?

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chickenboot
I 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!

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cek
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.

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darkstar999
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.

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misuba
People who have more money to trade than time.

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VLM
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.

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bradleyjg
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

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darkstar999
You probably mean interstate.

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amorphic
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.

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Dirlewanger
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?

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winslow
As a homebrewer $1800 can get you an amazing setup.

It looks to me that the picobrew is for those who don't want to do the 'heavy
lifting' of homebrewing and want to say that they homebrew. The automatic
bread machine of this generation?

For that price tag you aren't going to get people who want to test out
homebrewing. My first homebrew setup was ~$150. This included two buckets
(fermentor and bottling), kettle for boiling the wort and hops, bottles, basic
bottling accessories, and my first extract kit (fat tire clone).

On the other side they claim this is a professional tool. However, I would
highly doubt any real brewery would use this. They have their own pilot
systems where they typically make 20-50 gallon test batches. The output of 2.5
gallons is no where near ideal for a test batch. A gallon of beer gets you
roughly 10 (12 oz) bottles.

I'm not quite sure who their market actually is. Maybe it's rich people who
want to make their own beer? Seems like a small market.

Their machine (from what I gather in the video) comprises the following
features: Brewpi ~$60 ([http://www.brewpi.com](http://www.brewpi.com)) 5
Gallon Keg $60 used $110 new ([http://www.homebrewing.org/5-Gallon-Cornelius-
Keg-Ball-Lock-...](http://www.homebrewing.org/5-Gallon-Cornelius-Keg-Ball-
Lock-Used_p_70.html)) PicoBrew has a small mash tun (~3 gallon?) 10 gallon
mash tun - [http://www.homebrewing.org/10-Gallon-Converted-Igloo-
Cooler-...](http://www.homebrewing.org/10-Gallon-Converted-Igloo-Cooler-Mash-
Tun-With-False-Bottom_p_1006.html)

I don't understand where it boils the wort and how it actually mixes these
ingredients.

Realistically, anyone who is serious about homebrewing most likely won't be
using this. You can get the same amount of control that they advertise with
fermentation chambers, your own brewpi, and with detailed logging. Also part
of the fun is the actual brew process of boiling the wort and throwing in hops
with friends and never having to drink the same beer again.

It'll be interesting to see how this thing actually does.

Just my $0.02

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jimktrains2
> It looks to me that the picobrew is for those who don't want to do the
> 'heavy lifting' of homebrewing and want to say that they homebrew. The
> automatic bread machine of this generation?

I actually quite enjoy my bread machine. My wife and I both work and are
active in our community. It's extremely wonderful to spend 5 minutes before
bed and have bread in the morning. It's cheaper than buying bread at the store
(ok, the 50¢ loaves give it a run for it's money), and we know exactly whats
in it.

Once this comes down in price, which it or something like it will, to the
point where it's a few hundred I can see it being used in much the same way by
many folks: Good beer is expensive. OK beer is cheap. Home-machine-made beer
is better than OK and cheaper.

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chickenboot
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.h...](http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.html)

[2]
[http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249](http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249)

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smoyer
I was disappointed that it wasn't brewing coffee!

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chrisBob
Brews in an average of 4 hours?

Can that be right?

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chadzero
Plus a few weeks to ferment.

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zwieback
Plus refrigerated lagering, if you want real beer.

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craigching
Prefer ales myself ;) Especially real ales from England!

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

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QuotedForTruth
Check the store part. $1799

