PicoBrew – Counter-top home brewing machine
picobrew.com
picobrew.com
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.
Well that explains its popularity in Portland then.
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.
I have a friend who roasts his own coffee for similar reasons.
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.
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.
If I had to do it again, though, I'd get a smaller one. Something that can make a 1-pound loaf. My family doesn't go through 1.5 pounds in a day, and when you have a bread maker, keeping day-old bread is not an option.
Plus, the smaller batch sizes let you experiment and you won't be saddled with the 5 gallons of terrible oktoberfest in my basement.
- 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
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.
I brew both 5 gallon batches and 1 gallon batches (mostly for experimentation). TO keep the costs down on the gallon batches, I use washed yeast and hops leftover from other recipes. The cool thing about the gallon batches is you can squeeze in an all-grain brew in an evening on a weekday, but the obvious downside is it only yields ~9 beers, which I find to be too small a yield for the amount of effort. Also, if you already have a wort chiller, you won't save that much time compared to a 5 gallon extract brew.
If you are dead set on all grain, others on this thread have mentioned the brew-in-the-bag method. It looks like you just steep the grains (using a really big mesh bag). It looks like this method gets you about 3 gallons, but if you already have a bunch of equipment, you could probably adapt this method to 5 gallons.
From my experience, you only loose a few degrees of temp over the hour of steeping in the boil kettle. I usually put a towel or two on top of the lid to help retain heat, and if needed, will pour some hot water in from the tea kettle to keep the temp up, but that is rarely needed.
For a quick, hipstery, overview of the gallon batch method go here, I use this method for my gallon brews, and the results have been really good: http://brooklynbrewshop.com/instructions
I haven't tried this, but here is the brew-in-a-bag method: http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/brewing/biab-brew-in-a-ba...
I have a buddy in a similar situation as yours (kids, no time to brew). He has a killer setup (15 gallon, all-grain), and his solution was to just cut back to brewing a few times a year, and invite some buddies over to help. I think one gallon brews are best left to people in small apartments or for experimentation. In your situation, I would keep in mind the yield-per-time metric. A 15 gallon brew might take a few hours longer than a gallon brew, but it yields 15x more beers. Gallon brews are a good way to keep your brewing instincts sharp, but it won't keep your fridge full.
Before I sold off my brew equipment (that was a very hard thing to do!) I tried to set something up with my friends where they would store the equipment and I'd come over and brew with them. Amazingly no one wanted to at the time, but to this day they are kicking themselves for not taking advantage of it. I had nice quick-release hoses, a Therminator chiller (that is the one piece of equipment I almost kept, prior to that chilling times were killing me!), an nice 15 gallon polar ware brew pot and I was working on getting either a nice gravity setup or getting a stainless steel fermentor. The latter was in consideration because I'd once bounced a 6 gallon glass carboy off my floor accidentally and split my hands open. Not fun! Man, I miss brewing thinking about all that! :)
EDIT: I think once my kids are just a bit older I might be able to get back to a bigger brew. My kids are 6 and 3 so they still need a lot of attention. But I think once the 3 yo is maybe 6 I could probably do a big brew day again.
I got the basic process from http://www.amazon.com/True-Brews-Craft-Fermented-Kombucha/dp.... As a bonus, it also has instructions for mead, sake, kombucha, soda, fruit wines, and kefir. Each section includes a 'master' recipe and then 4 or 5 specific recipes. After a couple of batches, you will start making your own recipes without even thinking about it. I usually get 10 or 11 bottles from a batch, which is perfect for me. I'm not a daily drinker. The watermelon/mint soda combined with a good gin is dangerously good though, watch out for it.
The book uses the two-pot method that pyoung talks about. With such a small volume of water, the temperature is pretty stable, especially if you use gas. I found that the efficiency was a little lower than what I was used to, so I just used a little bit more grain, which increased my batch costs by about 25 cents. I ended up using a small sports cooler that I already had around - I wrap it in a towel and it stays remarkably stable, plus it has a spout on the bottom that makes sparging easier.
IKEA has 3 gallon pots for $12.
You can make this painful by growing your yeast from dry culture for days blah blah or just buy one of those smack bags where you break the inner container and let it boot up.
Once you're done, making applejack is just as illegal as operating a still, so just like fight club, don't talk about it.
I started off in the 90s making meads (my advice, avoid meads) and wines and the first time I made beer with some buddies I was somewhat stunned by how complicated it is. So I'm just saying if you want a nice fermented drink that's simpler than beer, its hard to find anything more complicated than beer, so ...
If time ever became a big constraint for me, I imagine I would just cut my brewing down to a few big beers a year (high gravity or other styles that call for long fermentation) which would keep the carboys full, but would also stretch out the time between brews. And then I would try and mix in some meads or all extract brews.
The problem is that straight honey mead is just not all that interesting to drink. It usually does have some of the residual honey character - but who wants to drink a pint of diluted honey?
By the time you get around to tweaking recipes that turn out a product most people would like you're either back at the same level of effort or time you'd have to spend making a regular grape wine.
I've made a handful of meads so far and I don't think I'm going to do another one unless I have a specific recipe in mind - maybe a metheglyn or a braggot.
It's also one of the few homebrews that can save you money. A good batch of homebrewed beer is often not much cheaper than a good store bought microbrew. Compare this to my local meadery which charges $22 for 750 ml of mead. I can brew 5 gallons (~19,000 ml) of good mead for around $60.
In Minnesota there is nothing compared to that. Some places will try to have a cask, but it's not the same (they usually use some sort of swirler to fake the real cask ale head). Our beers are just too high alcohol and force carbonated, it just isn't the same. When I visit England, I can drink 4 to 6 of these real ales and just have a mild buzz. Try that with a 7% IPA that you get here, doesn't work.
So here's a short list of some of my favorite beers from England. If you get a chance, give them a try! You must have them from a good pub (ask around) and they have to be fresh (they will be at a good pub):
Hogsback Traditional English Ale (yes, T.E.A) -- https://www.hogsback.co.uk
Hopback Summer Lightning -- http://www.hopback.co.uk
West Berkshire Good Ol' Boy -- http://www.wbbrew.com
Adnams Southwold Bitter -- http://adnams.co.uk
When I get back into brewing, these are the beers I'm going for ... unless it is indeed possible to "buy a 6-pack of something good instead" ;)
The idea that the hobbyist will in general produce a far better product than an industry of passionate experts is kind of ridiculous.
As for making exactly what you want, that's totally valid. If your palette doesn't quite match what the breweries are producing (e.g. you want less hops) then yes, you can produce a better beer for you at home.
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.
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.
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.
This machine would make better beer, more consistently, and with a lot less effort.
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.
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.
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
and a small splash page that gives a general overview of the components used here
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?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
Regardless, I just can't see this "catching on" to any degree with that price. Do they have plans to scale or something?
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.
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.
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.
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) 5 Gallon Keg $60 used $110 new (http://www.homebrewing.org/5-Gallon-Cornelius-Keg-Ball-Lock-...) PicoBrew has a small mash tun (~3 gallon?) 10 gallon mash tun - http://www.homebrewing.org/10-Gallon-Converted-Igloo-Cooler-...
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
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.
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...
Can that be right?
Of course, the fermentation is a matter of weeks, not hours.