Ex-Microsoft craft ale buffs rattle tankard for desktop brewery US home-brew tech outfit PicoBrew has raced past its Kickstarter fundraising target for its Pico "fully automatic craft beer brewing appliance". The device will produce five litre batches of "fresh personalized craft beer" in 5-7 days with minimum hassle, thanks to "convenient pre-packaged ingredient PicoPaks produced by …
A "craft beer" (by which I presume they mean real ale) in 5-7 days? The basic brewing process can be done in that time, you can clear with filtration or chemicals, but what then? Drink the stuff green?
This is a toy for people to lazy to even use an extract based kit. And a toy for people with more money than sense.
Agreed.
Mind you I just don't get it. Most of the fun with brewing is mixing up selections of malts and hops, mucking about with mashing temperatures and boil times/hop addition rates and the bazillion other alchemical variables that go into producing a decent beer. Drinking the result is just a bonus.
Some if you take away all the fun bits then what's the point in brewing? You may as well pop down the offie and get your gratification even more instantly and with even less effort.
Rosie
It needs special ingredient mixes, which means it's going to be the beer equivalent of EasiYo yogurt.
Since it needs special ingredients, they should be able to follow the ink jet printer business model - sell the unit for $49.99 and make the profit on the ingredients.
The most common definition of craft beer is: £1 more per pint
Most 'craft' brewers aim for more, sometimes £1 per third pint. The points that just try to be great beer are desperately trying to take the name back to just mean good beer, real or keg. We live in sad times when the marketing is more important than the product.
(A colleague with Brewdog shares and discounts can barely justify even the discounted prices!)
The US defines a craft brewery as one producing less than 6 million barrels a year, produces mostly beer from traditional ingredients an is not 25% or more owned by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not a small brewer.
Making something drinkable is not on the list of requirements.
The craft brewers association defines craft partly on how many pints it's largest member currently produces, with headspace for growth. 6mil now, it will grow to fit however large and bloated it's members get. The significant thing that actually affects quality is the insistence on source to consumer temperature control. The problem is that doesn't stop Coors, Miller or Bud delivering perfectly cooked crap everywhere, it's a minimum quality limit. A very low limit.
If you want gluten free, adventurous beers then you could try looking up my father's micro brewery.
Here's a recent BBC piece on it where he crafted a beer using 50 year old yeast to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Maris Otter malt - regarded as one of the finest malts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YT62kueAVA
According to one brewer I met in the USA last May, only unfiltered and yeast ridden beer is craft. He does not let his brews settle. He says that it detracts from the taste.
This was about 30 miles from MS HQ. Don't need to say anything else.
I think I'll have a bottle of 'Gardeners Tipple' tonight. Very nice brew.
All you need to brew beer in is a clear 25lt polyethylene jerry can. As long as you don't overtighten the bung....... keep it loose enough for CO2 to vent out
You can brew and fine/clarify it in the same container. When complete decant it into a polypin or similar.
Important: treat the jerry can and polypin as disposable
Temperature control during the process is important too, more so with 'pico' batches (surface area to volume ratios scaling as they do)... you might have an area of your house that maintains a roughly constant temperature, or manage temperature by other means.
You are right to highlight hygiene, though. Metal casks are often cleaned/sterilised with high pressure boiling water.
Except he used the immersion heater and thermostat from a 120 gallon fish tank. He had managed to purloin a massive nylon vessel from somewhere, I think it had a capacity of close to 40 gallons. This was fired up when the stock of home brew began to get below a certain point, by the time it was ready for bottling most of the stock was gone and the bottles were available for the new batch. He used the porcelain capped French pop bottles, always amusing drinking beer from a bottle marked Pshitt!. He usually had enough left to tide him over until the new bottled batch was ready to drink. Having drunk a few of his brews I'd say it was close to 6.5%, and kicked you in the arse, hard.
I think you'll find that here on the left or here on the right is actual the "B-52 blonde."
Same rule-of-thumb as pubs - if a busy pub is run by a rude miserable landlord, that is a good sign that the beer is well-kept. If the bar is staffed by an exquisitely pretty barmaid, that is a sign that the beer alone might not be good enough to bring the punters in.
Good beer sells itself. If I want to look at nudey pics, I don't need to look at a beer advert (or even buy ten packets of peanuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_D_(peanuts)#Promotional_displays )
Doesn't that sort of ruin the point? Home brewing of craft booze is good because you can experiment, try new things and learn. This is "insert pack and brew our beer"; no changing what's in the packet, and without the convenience of just going to the shop for a case of your favorite tipple.
Yes, sounds like Kuerig to me. Which, incidentally, there are refillable cartridges for (at least the older models); so you could roast your own coffee, mill to your spec, and place in the cartridge to brew. Still would taste crap because the process is wrong IMO: it puts boiling water through the coffee (rather than ~90C) and doesn't let it steep, resulting in thin bitter coffee with sediment.
I wonder if the PicoBrew has a comparable result with beer. I say don't knock it 'til you've tried it, but certainly don't shell out $499 before tasting what it produces. And even if it produces good beer, I fail to see how it's worth that much money.
$19 for a 5 litre pack, roughly $4 per litre, $2 per pint (roughly). £1.30 per pint.
With exchange rates, this basically means that the beer it brews costs the same as buying '3 bottles for £5' from a British supermarket near you.
It's a moot point for me - I only drink beer in pubs, and I tend to use a few pubs that sell beer from long-standing local microbreweries.
'Craft beer' is only a marketing term. Still, I guess we should be thankful that the real ale market is healthy, even if this current crop of microbreweries seem obsessed with American-hopped IPAs. Taste is personal preference, it's just a bit boring when a good social pub only has four IPAs and a porter (because they have bought it cheap from wholesalers who have in turn bought it cheap from newly-established IPA-obsessed breweries with little reputation)
It's hideously expensive per pint and, as pointed out above, the beer's not "craft".
If you want something DIY then just home brew the usual way and if you're after "craft" beer buy it by the bottle as it's not going to be more expensive than this.
What is the point of this?
I guess that once you've got the hang of the kits, you can source your ingredients more cheaply from other sources.
The $500 price tag suggests that the machine is being sold above cost, so there won't be any 'printer ink cartridge / Kuerig cofffee capsule' extortion on the consumables.
From reading the manual and watching the vids it also looks like a scaled down brewery with phases for mashing grain to create wort etc. so it's still a pretty messy and intensive process and still has plenty of manual effort involved. e.g. sanitizing equipment, disposing of grains, adding yeast for secondary fermentation etc.
It's more like a hobbiest machine that would appeal to somebody who brews from scratch for themselves but is looking for something eliminates some of the effort. For somebody who buys a kit from Wilkinson (i.e. mix gloop with warm water and yeast) it would probably represent far more effort and expense.
From a cost perspective, you'd also have to use this thing constantly to get value out of it. Someone might have to brew a lot of beer, possibly 1000L before the cost of the machine, picopaks, sanitzing fluids, electricity, CO2 cylinders etc. brought the cost to less than just buying beer in a supermarket. Given it only brews in 5L batches you might to have it in continuous use for years to achieve that.
CO2 cylinders etc
CO2 in cylinders? Pray tell, what part does that play in beer (or even cider) making? Bottle conditioning, that's the way.
The messy way, should you make the sort of error I made a few weeks back. The bang was audible in a double glazed house, even though the bottle was in an outbuilding forty feet away. That distinctive BOOOooommmppphh! tinkle tinkle sound whose cause you intuitively know without having to investigate. Lucky it was a single bottle experiment.
thats exactly why its better to use polypins for storing it
Nooooooooo! You mean you store your beer in a plastic bag?
I could forgive a rigid food grade plastic pressure barrel, but CO2 injectors, plastic baggers, instant beer making machines.....the end times are upon us.
You deserve a Party 7 of Watneys Red Barrel.
I'm not known for my green credentials (snort) but I have had good results bottle conditioning in polycarbonate soft drink bottles. They can take up to 100psi ISTR.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reanimate.
Better to reuse than recycle, and as turbo cider can get to 12% with a wine yeast you reduce your consumption!
Plus the hangover can be a little like the living dead so the reanimate is covered too!
"Nooooooooo! You mean you store your beer in a plastic bag?"
Absolutely
the beer keeps working in the polypin producing CO2 and keeping is mildly gassed. Over gassing isn't a problem as pressure is released as you draw the beer off. The benefit is no oxygen gets into the polypin, so less chance of the beer going off.
Its naturally conditioned, its not pressurised, and it keeps fresh.
FWIW if you buy cider direct from the farm its how it comes
Someone mentioned possibility of coffee pod style pricing - it's already there - $19 for a 5l beer kit is steep. Pay the extra £150 for this: http://www.brewuk.co.uk/grainfather.html and do proper batches. If you cannot be bothered to weigh your own ingredients (why bother doing this at all in that case), you can get recipe packs for £12 for 23l of beer - but buying ingredients separate is far cheaper.
Personally, I do mini/mash/extract brewing - which strikes a good balance of time, cost and results for me. - that usually works out around £1 per litre, has very low start up costs and still allows for recipe tinkering. I've stopped drinking beer in pubs, as very few have any well looked after ale - rather some old, flat as a fart dish water.
Bread makers are great. Mostly not as good as doing it manually, but still not at all bad. Although weighing, mixing and kneeding the dough only takes ten minutes, you've then got to be around for the next 3-5 hours, depending on what you're making. Well unless you're doing soda bread, or things like pita or naan.
The most convenient bread is sourdough - as it takes longer to rise, so you can make the dough before bed, and cook it the next morning. If you try that with normal breads, the yeast overgrows and they go bitter.
Soup with fresh bread is a lovely Saturday lunchtime treat. Or set the timer on the machine, and wake up to the smell of just made bread. I've got a teasmade as well, so can wake up to a cuppa.
The fond childhood memories of sneaking into the garage and nicking a swig... then instantly spitting it back into the jug.
I can't be the only one who has student memories* along the lines of "if we keep fermenting this as long as possible, we get free alcohol". The result was a sinister, almost still beverage with a strong taste and good deal of sediment. The effects were generally everything we expected.
* I can remember brewing the stuff, but as with concussion, there's a blank patch after we started drinking it.
If the house is not trashed during the party and the guilty bodies are not lying on the floor saying 'Ooh Me Head' the next morning after a gentle kick prior to being re-animated with Full English, including carcinogens, so they can clean the place up prior to brushing their teeth and going down the Pub then it is not 'Home Brew'.
Water, grain, hops. Bring to boil.
Cool a bit. Filter. Add yeast. (Perhaps add more hops.)
Park in a bucket with an air-lock. (Maybe with more hops.)
Once the air-lock stops bubbling, you have beer.
Bottle as you see fit. You'll need additional sugar for fizz, if you want that.
Major point: Cleanliness is next to deliciousness.
My 190l (50 gallon) 3-stage setup cost me about US$500 about 20 years ago ...
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