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.
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.<p>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.<p>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...<p>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.
I've pre-ordered a Brewbot (<a href="http://www.brewbot.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brewbot.io/</a>) and can't wait for it to arrive. This one looks cool too, but a bit less customization potential.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>You can see an automated run of our prototype here<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mttrd7mGvI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mttrd7mGvI</a><p>and a small splash page that gives a general overview of the components used here<p><a href="http://brewmasters.herokuapp.com/brewery" rel="nofollow">http://brewmasters.herokuapp.com/brewery</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
For any home brewers who might be interested I maintain braubuddy, a temperature control framework written in Python:<p><a href="http://braubuddy.org/" rel="nofollow">http://braubuddy.org/</a><p>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.<p>It'll also publish metrics to a variety of outputs, with the next release to support Twitter, Librato, and Hosted Graphite.
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.<p>Regardless, I just can't see this "catching on" to any degree with that price. Do they have plans to scale or something?
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).<p>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.<p>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).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/speidels-braumeister-en.h...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249" rel="nofollow">http://forums.morebeer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39249</a>