An IT engineer and a med student walks in to a bar. They get disappointed by the corn infested MegaBrews, so comes the motivation to put up a fight.
First of all we are beer enthusiasts, who through their beer drinking life saw the depression of quality of MegaBrews in Hungary, but had the good opportunity to taste real beer with the awakening of craft breweries in the country. Given the chance by the 2012 legalization of homebrewing, we came to realize that there is a whole world, we have yet to discover.
We brew. Small scale but high tech. While our first batch on a gas stove came out pretty nice. We were amazed by the shiny steel barrels and glowing red displays of our American and Australian colleagues on homebrewer forums. We decided it's better to kick back and enjoy your last brew than to bend over all day to stir the steaming pot.
Therefore, our journey to automation begun. As small single board computers were already a hot topic first we turned to Raspberry Pi, a credit card size linux based computer, but eventually ended up with a more specialized tool.
Currently we use our custom built SparkCore powered brewing system. This is a BIAB (Brew In a Bag) solution which is built on a top of some cool technologies like: Node.js, MongoDB, AngularJS and Twitter Bootstrap. It's Wi-Fi enabled, with an responsive web interface, you can easily control your brew with a touch of a smartphone. We have iOS application too: BrewMobile. Our codebase is available on GitHub so you can start easily from a scratch and build your own brewing machine. As an open source project we would be more than happy if you would join and contribute.
In the near future we will release blog posts which will introduce our system and make everything clear. We will also cover the hardware part of the story.
Check our DEMO ;)
Like any homebrewer, we dream of our very own micro brewery. But as in so many other cases the journey could be more interesting than the goal itself. As our BrewCore made its first batches, we already want to take a next step and conquer the fermentation process hopefully with almost the same system.
This page functions as a progressive collection of our articles and GitHub repositories, through which we share the building steps of our brew system's hardware as well as software.
Our goal is to share the automated brew experience with fellow homebrewers, so every one of us could get a step closer to a self tailored perfect beer.