homebrew

102 Articles

Keeping Beer Chilled From Keg To Tap

March 28, 2011 by 21 Comments

beer_chiller

[Stan] was putting together his nano-brewery, and while waiting for his beer to finish fermenting, he decided to work on the storage portion of his project. He built a kegerator to store his forthcoming brews but realized that since it was about 10 feet away from his tap tower, the beer was becoming unacceptably warm and frothy in transit.

In commercial tap systems, a separate line of chilled propylene glycol is bundled with the beer lines, keeping it cool as it travels from keg to tap. [Stan] decided to replicate this setup, and after three different iterations, he nailed it.

His first two attempts involved keeping the cooling solution inside of the kegerator, but he found that either the pumps added too much heat to the solution, or that the kegerator was running at nearly a 100% duty cycle. Scrapping any sort of kegerator-based cooling, he decided to build a separate cooling unit with a dehumidifier he had sitting around. After fitting the unit into a cooler and filling it with solution, he found it to cool so well it turned the propylene glycol solution to slush!

Check out his site for more details on his cooling setup – if you are in the business of homebrew, you will be glad you did.

Automated Home Beer Brewery — Best Laundry Room Add-on Ever

March 28, 2011 by 24 Comments

All-grain home brewing takes time… a lot of time. We’re not going to pretend like a good batch of beer isn’t thanks mostly to the artist that is the brewmaster, but at the same time it’s pretty amazing to see a compact system like the one above that can boil a batch of wort without much help from you.

[Zizzle] built this machine as his entry in the Renesas contest. You can see the development board there just to the left of the brew kettle. It’s network connected with a web interface that allows you to take recipes from Brewtarget and import them directly to the system. All you need to do is make sure that you load up the grain basket and boil addition modules to match your recipe. The bot takes it from there, filling the kettle, preheating that water, lowering the grains and maintaining temperature for the mash, and completing the boil with additions from the servo-controlled PVC pipe pods. Experienced brewers will notice a few steps missing, like the sparge, and a quick way to cool the finished wort. But this does take a huge part of the drudgery out of our hands. If only it had a clean-in-place system… then we’d really be happy! Don’t miss the video after the break and take a moment to check out the build-log posts.

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Weather Station Turned Data Logger

March 15, 2011 by 10 Comments

Home brewing the perfect beer (or root beer in this case) requires a watchful eye and stable temperature, but [Gregory] has a house that is 120 years old. While we are sure it is a beautiful home, it does have its usual historical issues including temperature fluctuations.

[Gregory] suspects this to be the reason why his root beer is not carbonating, but to be 100% sure he grabbed a weather station (and atomic clock) with a wireless remote thermometer and got hacking. After popping the station apart he was able to quickly isolate the radio receiver and figure out the signaling, a few connections to an arduino, and now he can keep track of the temperature as its logged on to his PC.

Hopefully he can find out if this is his issue or not. Join us after the break for a quick video.

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PSP Homebrew Using The Half-Byte Loader

June 21, 2010 by 22 Comments

[Rich] tipped us off about the Half-Byte Loader which lets you run homebrew on late-model Sony PlayStation Portables. Above you can see a PSP Go running Doom (a screenshot from the video after the break), which is a prerequisite for any cracked device. HBL uses an exploit in the game demo of Patapon 2, which is free for download. A crafted game save loaded onto a Memory Stick gets you to the loader when selected from the continue menu of the game. Right now this method works on all know firmware version 5.0 and higher. Who knows when Sony will take action to kill an exploit like this one.

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USB Gameboy Cart

August 28, 2009 by 20 Comments

gamecart

[Jose Torres] sent in his latest attempt at creating a custom Gameboy game cartridge. We’ve featured his projects before, and he’s come a lot closer over the last 2 years. He’s aiming to create an easy interface for homebrewers that doesn’t require any other special equipment. In this revision, he’s using a PIC and a memory controller to interface between an SD card and the Gameboy. The cart also has USB support for uploading files to the SD card and reprogramming the PIC. Because it’s just USB mass storage, it will work on almost any modern OS. He’s currently testing the device, but hopes to be selling them soon for $40.

Homebrew Wii Via The Bannerbomb Exploit

August 21, 2009 by 26 Comments

bannerbomb_exploit

The Twilight Princess hack doesn’t work on newer versions of the Nintendo Wii, but thanks to a new exploit for the Wii, homebrew is still possible. Using an SD card and a few files, you can have the homebrew channel up and running in no time. The folks at Lifehacker show us how it’s done. It’s good to see that the Wii modding community is still in full force. Hopefully, this won’t turn into a back and forth battle between modders and Nintendo, like it has with Sony and the PSP.

New PSP Leaked

May 30, 2009 by 54 Comments

psp_go

Engadget has video from the June 2009 episode of Qore that shows the new PSP Go. It has a slide out gamepad, 16GB internal storage, bluetooth, and a memory slot of some sort. We’re naturally curious about its potential as a homebrew platform. Will Sony take the mature route they did with the PS3 and let you run Linux or will they continue the firmware arms race the PSP is known for? We’ll be hearing more about this platform at E3 next week.