home brewing

2 Articles

BrewBuddy Is A Home Brewer’s Best Friend

January 8, 2018 by 7 Comments

Whether coffee, tea, or beer is your jam, brewing is a delicate pas de deux of time and temperature. Proper brewing of any of these beverages can elevate the experience from average to amazing. With this in mind, [Marcelo] created a time and temperature tool to dial in his beer-brewing process.

BrewBuddy is a complex application-specific timer with an integrated thermometer. It lets him program time and temperature profiles for both the mashing process and the boiling process and store up to 10 steps for each. BrewBuddy doesn’t control the brewing temperature, but it does unify temperature-taking and time-marking into one convenient device that can last about 20 hours on a single CR2032.

The system is based on an STM32 and an LMT86 analog temperature sensor which has been modified to sit inside a stainless steel tube. There are four directional buttons to navigate through intuitive menus to set the desired times and temperatures. As each step completes, the status LED lights up and BrewBuddy waits for confirmation via button push before moving on to the next step. If there’s a problem, the timer can be paused and resumed using the up/down buttons. [Marcelo] is working to perfect the case design, but he already has the board files and firmware up on GitHub. Open up a cold one and check out the demo videos after the break.

After boiling and cooling comes fermentation, and that requires careful monitoring of the sugar content. Here’s a tool for that.

Continue reading “BrewBuddy Is A Home Brewer’s Best Friend” →

Sous Vide Brewing

Brewing Beer With A Sous Vide Cooker

February 7, 2015 by 17 Comments

[Ken] found an interesting use for his sous vide cooker. He’s been using it to help him with his home brewing. It’s unlikely that the manufacturer ever intended it to be used in this manner, but as hackers we don’t really care about warranties.

Beer brewing is as much of an art as it is a science. There are a lot of variables that go into the process, and tweaking any one of them can result in your beer tasting different. There is one process during brewing that is called mashing. Mashing is when you soak malted grains in hot water to pull out the sugar. The amount of sugar that gets extracted is very dependent on how long the grains are soaked, and the temperature of the water. If you want your beer to taste a certain way, then you want to ensure that the water stays at constant, repeatable temperature.

As a home brewer, [Ken] has been using his stove top to heat the water. This gets the water warm, but in order to keep the temperature consistent, he has to constantly monitor the temperature and adjust the knob accordingly. Who wants to sit around and do that all day? He needed something to control the temperature automatically. Enter the sous vide cooker.

Sous vide is a method of cooking in which food is placed into an airtight bag and then submerged in a water bath with very strict temperature control. The process takes a long time to cook the food, but the result is supposed to be meat that is cooked perfectly even while also retaining all of the moisture and juices. [Ken] figured he might be able to use a sous vide cooker to control the temperature of the mash instead of a water bath.

His experiment worked wonderfully. He used the stove top to help get the mash up to the close temperature, then the sous vide cooker was used to fine tune things from there. [Ken] says he was able to achieve 75% efficiency with his mash, which is exactly what he was going for. Continue reading “Brewing Beer With A Sous Vide Cooker” →