Hardware

Raspberry Pi and Beer: A match made in heaven

By // September 20, 2012, 7:21 PM PST // nickjheath

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  • Two of the world's greatest things, the Raspberry Pi and Beer, have come together in a project that is the definition of homebrew.

    The aptly-named Beer Church group, part of the Chicago-based Pumping Station: One modding collective, have been using the $40 Linux board to help brew Irish Stout.

    During fermentation beer must be kept at fairly precisely controlled temperatures. The required temperature varies according to the stage of fermentation, as well as other factors, and the Pi-based brewing aid helps keep the temperature within acceptable limits.

    Photo: Eric Stein

  • The Raspberry Pi is being used to run a Python app known as chillmon.

    Chillmon, seen booting up on the Pi here, monitors the temperature of the fermenting beer and turns on a chiller - using a PID loop - for a set time once the temperature hits a certain threshold.

    The temperature can be remotely monitored via an IRC chat bot that can display sensor readings.

    Photo: Eric Stein 

  • A breadboard, a board for constructing prototype circuit boards, used with the project.

    Eric Stein, CTO for Pumping Station: One, said the group's aim is to take some of the unpredictability out of the art of brewing.

    ”We want repeatability. Yeast is a picky beast it'll do things like make bad flavors, die, or fail to prevent your brew from getting moldy - if you don't keep the temperature right and sterilise everything like you ought to,” he said.

    ”People who say there's more art than science in whatever it is that they do are neglecting that science has been improving art since humans came up with it.”

    Photo: Eric Stein 

  • The app allows the group to check on their beer, seen being brewed up here, despite not living near the location where they brew.

    “One of the main reasons to instrument the brew is to allow our homebrewing community to have a way to check on the brew from home, as they would if they had it in their basement," Stein said.

    Photo: Eric Stein 

  • Temperature readings can also be turned into a graph and viewed via desktop or mobile web browsers.

    Photo: Eric Stein 

  • The Beer Church group plan to expand the app into a general purpose system for brewing beer.

    Planned features include: a mash schedule, the ability to run burners and maintain a set temperature and a beerxml input.

    "By having all this data at our fingertips both on our LAN and on the internet, we can know the temperature a brew was at during the entire duration of its fermentation," Stein said.

    He said the group plans to use future versions of the app to "track each individual brew from start to finish with all the data points - temperature, recipe, mash schedule, ferment temperature, gravity readings, etc.

    "I know plenty of homebrewers who have had issues with their beer not coming out the same way each time, and they often don't know why it is exactly. This is an attempt to apply information technology to the problem."

    Photo: Eric Stein 

Two of the world's greatest things, the Raspberry Pi and Beer, have come together in a project that is the definition of homebrew.

The aptly-named Beer Church group, part of the Chicago-based Pumping Station: One modding collective, have been using the $40 Linux board to help brew Irish Stout.

During fermentation beer must be kept at fairly precisely controlled temperatures. The required temperature varies according to the stage of fermentation, as well as other factors, and the Pi-based brewing aid helps keep the temperature within acceptable limits.

Photo: Eric Stein

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About Nick Heath

Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic. He writes about the technology that IT decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene.