Kickstarter is a wonderful place for all kinds of products that might not otherwise make it to market. Once such new comer to the world of crowd sourcing is the PicoBrew Zymatic; the Automatic Beer Brewing Appliance. The Zymatic’s Kickstarter is only two days in and has already reached their $150,000 goal despite a fairly high pledge for the appliance itself in the rewards. The appliance promises a lot though, and has the kind of team to deliver on that promise.
The team is led by co-founders Bill Mitchell, Jim Mitchell and Avi Geiger. Mitchell is a former Microsoft executive who oversaw the development of early PDAs, smartphones, and wearable computing devices. His brother Jim is a food scientist and physicist whose grandfather was the inventor of Pop Rocks, Tang and Cool Whip. Avi Geiger, the final member of the trifecta, is a former hardware architect with Microsoft. Their expertise is exactly what you’d need in what Bill Mitchell calls, “an espresso-maker for beer”.
Home brewers can often struggle with their brews. It’s supposed to be a fun and easy process but many people quit because of the amount of work that needs to be put into home brewing. It pays off but nothing like the PicoBrew Zymatic promises. The steps are fairly simple:
- Get a recipe. You can do this by importing one in XML format.
- Pull the ingredients together from a local home-brew shop or from the internet
- Fill the 5G Cornelius keg with water and attach the hoses to the PicoBrew Zymatic
- Load the grains
- Load the hops into each adjunct compartment
- Load the step filter
- Brew!
After a short time, about 3 ½ hours depending on your recipe, the keg will contain your wort. Most people would wonder how the system works, their Kickstarter page is full of information. One important fact is that the PicoBrew Zymatic doesn’t brew at a full boil. Because of crude home systems not being able to maintain a constant 208 F temperature, they have to perform a full boil to insure the sugars are separated from the grains into the wort. The Pico Zymatic makes those technical steps an automated process. After adding some yeast and waiting about a week you’ll have a fresh batch of robotically made beer.
Their project has been in development since 2010 when they designed their first one using Arduino controllers. After three years of development, PicoBrew LLC is now ready to take the brewing world by storm. If you’d like to get in on their first or second production runs you’ll have to act fast because the pilot program rewards are already gone. The estimated delivery for the first and second production runs is March and April 2014. If your thirst for robotically made beer can wait that long, go check them out here.
The PicoBrew Zymatic
I for one, welcome our beer brewing robot overlords. If you you’d like to discuss this further, please do so in the comments. If you’d like to know what I’m currently drinking, send me a tweet @MarkAvo. Cheers!