Lose The Beer Belly By Brewing Beer

If you’re milling your own grains for that next batch of beer you might be able to melt all of those extra calories away while you’re at it. [Eucherboy1] repurposed an unused exercise bike to power his grain mill. The propane tank is serving as a weight to hold the base of the mill in place; it’ll be used later when boiling the wort. A belt transfers power from the bike to a wheel replacing the hand crank on the mill. Check out the video after the break to see [Euchreboy1] working up a sweat. We think there’s much room for improving the gear ratio of the setup. Or he can just man up and push through the pain.

We’ve gotten used to seeing ways to power a bicycle, like using wood-fired steam, or even by incorporating a chainsaw. But the hacks that use a bike as a power source are a bit less common. Our local hackerspace made a bicycle blender a while back. Got any projects of your own that are bike powered? Send them our way!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_RghNYTPD8&w=470]

[Thanks Adam]

19 thoughts on “Lose The Beer Belly By Brewing Beer

  1. This is a pretty awesome idea. Because of my back I have my two brewing buddies do all the heavy work. I should set something like this up for next time they come over to brew. See how long they stick around!

  2. @Cole
    I would say a power storage would be a necessity. I mean you’re talking 60 min mash and a 60 min boil at least…two hours of intense cardio while trying to transfer liquids, maintain temps, and such would be too much :-0

  3. Thank you for all of the comments. This was a project which I had wanted to do for a long time.

    The project actually consisted of 2 separate bicycles. 1. The exercycle and 2. a little girl’s bicycle.

    I took the wheel off of the exercycle and replaced it with the rear wheel of the kid bike – because the small wheel seemed like it would hold a belt better. The real pain came from the fact that the axle on the kid wheel was too big to fit in the frame of the exercycle.

    After some finagling, I was able to make it work by bending the original wheel supports on the exercycle. If you look close, you’ll see the kid wheel isn’t actually supported by anything more than a few twist ties and some zip ties. [I wish I knew how to weld! For now, everything in my house is held together with zip ties.]

    When I finished (the first time) the wheel was somewhat off-centered and the chain would fall off repeatedly. I had to make some more adjustments to get the wheel – just right – before the chain would no longer fall off.

    It’s sort of funny that this ended up on the beer forum, I’m a homebrewer, but I actually intended this setup to make flour. I can easily crack the amount of grain necessary (by hand crank) for a brew in a short amount of time, but it takes significantly longer to create a fine flour.

    Oh, and just in case you’re wondering – the mill is a “Grainmaker” mill.

Leave a Reply to barry99705Cancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.