Improving Soda By Turning It Into Mead

March 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

Test tasting soda mead. (Credit: Golden Hive Mead, YouTube)

You can certainly just chug down that bottle of soda you purchased, but if you accept the premise that the preparation of food and drink is just a subset of chemistry, and that chemistry is fun, then it naturally follows that using soda as the basis for brewing up some mead makes perfect sense. Thus the [Golden Hive Mead] blokes over on YouTube decided to create some Coca Cola flavored mead.

Mead is essentially just water mixed with honey that is left to ferment after adding yeast, resulting in what is also called ‘honey wine’, with an ethanol content of usually between 3.5% and 20%. Since soda is mostly water and comes with its own supply of sugar for yeast to feast on, this isn’t such a crazy choice in that respect. Just make sure to remove the carbonation, as the CO₂ makes the soda too acidic for the yeast to be happy.

Instead of straight honey, caramelized honey was used for extra flavor after which the brew was left to ferment for a while. For extra flavor notes aged oak, vanilla and cinnamon were added as well, to ensure that the fermentation didn’t erase those core notes of the coke. The result was apparently rather flavorful, with about a 10.5% ethanol content, receiving the full approval of both tame test tasters.

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Automated Brewing

August 26, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

There’s little more to making alcoholic beverages than sugar, water, yeast, and time. Of course those with more refined or less utilitarian tastes may want to invest a bit more care and effort into making their concoctions. For beer making especially this can be a very involved task, but [Fieldman] has come up with a machine that helps automate the process and take away some of the tedium.

[Fieldman] has been making beers in relatively small eight-liter batches for a while now, and although it’s smaller than a lot of home brewers, it lends itself perfectly to automation. Rather than use a gas stove for a larger boil this process is done on a large hot plate, which is much more easily controlled by a microcontroller. The system uses an ESP32 for temperature control, and it also runs a paddle stirrer and controls a screen which lets the brewer know when it’s time to add ingredients or take the next step in the process. Various beers can be programmed in, and the touchscreen makes it easy to know at a glance what’s going on.

For a setup of this size this is a perfect way to take away some of the hassle of beer brewing like making sure the stove didn’t accidentally get too hot or making sure it’s adequately stirred for the large number of hours it might take to brew, but it still leaves the brewer in charge for the important steps.

Beer brewing is a hobby with a lot of rabbit holes to jump down, and it can get as complicated as you like. Just take a look at this larger brewery setup that automates more tasks on a much larger scale.

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A DIY Fermenter For Flavorful Brews

August 3, 2025 by Matt Varian 15 Comments

Fermentation is a culinary art where tiny organisms transform simple ingredients into complex flavors — but they’re finicky about temperature. To keep his brewing setup at the perfect conditions, [Ken] engineered the Fermenter, a DIY insulated chamber controlled by Home Assistant for precision and remote monitoring.

The Fermenter build starts with an insulated chamber constructed from thick, rigid foam board, foil tape, weather strips, and a clever use of magnets to secure the front and top panels, allowing quick access to monitor the fermentation process. The chamber is divided into two sections: a larger compartment housing the fermentation vessel and a smaller one containing frozen water bottles. A fan, triggered by the system, circulates cool air from the bottle chamber to regulate temperature when things get too warm.

The electronics are powered by an ESP8266 running ESPHome firmware, which exposes its GPIO pins for seamless integration with Home Assistant, an open-source home automation platform. A DS18B20 temperature sensor provides accurate readings from the fermentation chamber, while a relay controls the fan for cooling. By leveraging Home Assistant, [Ken] can monitor and adjust the Fermenter remotely, with the flexibility to integrate additional devices without rewiring. For instance, he added a heater using a heat mat and a smart outlet that operates independently of the ESP8266 but is still controlled via Home Assistant.

Thanks [Ken] for sending us the tip on this ingenious project he’s been brewing. If you’re using Home Assistant in a unique way, be sure to send in your project for us to share. Don’t forget to check out some of the other Home Assistant projects we’ve published over the years. Like a wind gauge, maybe. Or something Fallout-inspired.

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Making Beer Like It’s 1574, For Science And Heritage

April 30, 2024 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Are you interested in the history of beer, food science, or just a fan of gathering “um, actually” details about things? Well you’re in for a treat because FoodCult (exploring Food, Culture, and Identity in early modern Ireland) has a fantastic exhibition showcasing their recreation of beer last brewed in the sixteenth century by putting serious scientific work into it, and learning plenty in the process.

A typical historical beer of middling strength was around 5% alcohol by volume, similar to a modern-day lager.

The recipes, equipment and techniques are straight from what was used at Dublin Castle in the late 1500s. This process yielded very interesting insights about what beer back then was really like, how strong it was, and what was involved in the whole process.

Documentation from the era also provides cultural insight. Beer was often used to as payment and provided a significant amount of dietary energy. Dublin Castle, by the way, consumed some 26,000 gallons per year.

In many ways, beer from back then would be pretty familiar today, but there are differences as well. Chief among them are the ingredients.

While the ingredients themselves are unsurprising in nature, it is in fact impossible to 100% recreate the beer from 1574 for a simple reason: these ingredients no longer exist as they did back then. Nevertheless, the team did an inspired job of getting as close as possible to the historical versions of barley, oats, hops, yeast, and even the water. Continue reading “Making Beer Like It’s 1574, For Science And Heritage” →

Why Do Brits Drink Warm Beer?

August 16, 2022 by Jenny List 152 Comments

Traveling through mainland Europe on a British passport leads you to several predictable conversations. There’s Marmite of course, then all the fun of the Brexit fair, and finally on a more serious note, beer. You see, I didn’t know this, but after decades of quaffing fine ales, I’m told we do it wrong because we drink our beer warm. “Warm?”, I say, thinking of a cooling glass of my local Old Hooky which is anything but warm when served in an Oxfordshire village pub, to receive the reply that they drink their beers cold. A bit of international deciphering later it emerges that “warm” is what I’d refer to as “cold”, or in fact “room temperature”, while “cold” in their parlance means “refrigerated”, or as I’d say it: “Too cold to taste anything”. Mild humour aside there’s clearly something afoot, so it’s time to get to the bottom of all this. Continue reading “Why Do Brits Drink Warm Beer?” →

Arduino And The Other Kind Of Homebrew

January 26, 2019 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Usually, when we are talking about homebrew around here, we mean building your own equipment. However, most other people probably mean brewing beer, something that’s become increasingly popular as one goes from microbreweries to home kitchen breweries. People have been making beer for centuries so you can imagine it doesn’t take sophisticated equipment, but a little automation can go a long way to making it easier. When [LeapingLamb] made a batch using only a cooler, a stock pot, and a propane burner, he knew he had to do something better. That’s how Brew|LOGIC was born.

There are many ways to make beer, but Brew|LOGIC focuses on a single vessel process and [LeapingLamb] mentions that the system is akin to a sous vide cooker, keeping the contents of the pot at a specific temperature.

Honestly, though, we think he’s selling himself a bit short. The system has a remote application for control and is well-constructed. This isn’t just a temperature controller thrown into a pot. There’s also a pump for recirculation.

The common stock pot gets some serious modifications to hold the heating element and temperature probe. It also gets some spring-loaded clamps to hold the lid down. Expect to do a lot of drilling.

The electronics uses an Arduino, a Bluetooth board, and some relays (including a solid state relay). The finished system can brew between 5 and 15 gallons of beer at a time. While the system seems pretty good to us, he did list some ideas he has for future expansion, including valves, sensors for water level and specific gravity, and some software changes.

After reading that the system was similar to a sous vide cooker, we wondered if you could use a standard one. Turns out, you can. If you want to make better beer without electronic hacking, there’s always the genetic kind.

Making A Small-Scale Brewery With A Raspberry Pi And Python

July 9, 2017 by Jenny List 22 Comments

No doubt many Hackaday readers will have tried their hand at home brewing. It’s easy enough, you can start with a can of hopped malt extract and a bag of sugar in a large bucket in your kitchen and achieve a decent enough result. Of course, once you get the taste it’s a field of infinite possibilities, so many enthusiasts go further into the realm of beer making with specialty ingredients and carefully controlled mash tuns.

Such an inductee into the brewery arts is [Christopher Aedo], who has documented his automated brewing system driven by a Raspberry Pi running CraftBeerPi. And it’s an impressive setup, with boil kettle, mash tun, and heat exchanger, a 5KW heating element, and all associated valves, pipes, pumps, and sensors. This ensures consistency and fine control over temperature over the long-term at all stages of the brew, something that would be very difficult to achieve manually at this scale.

The whole brewery is mounted on a cart for portability and has been used for a lot of brew cycles of many different styles. We can’t help a touch of envy at the array of beer taps in his kitchen.

Over the years we’ve brought you a few brewing projects. Another Pi-based setup graced these pages in 2012, as did a brewery using a Lego Mindstorms controller. Top marks go though to the brewer who fought his beer belly through brewing machinery powered by an exercise bike.

Via Recantha.