Beer-brewing robot allows you to make your own beer with your iPhone

If you’ve ever wanted to brew your very own beer without a lot of effort, you may not have to wait much longer. Let’s face it, not everyone is capable of building an electric home brewery, but this new method uses your iPhone to bring the brewery home instead.

Brewbot located in a Portland, OR, bar. (Image via Cargo)

Anybody who’s ever taken up brewing as a hobby knows that it’s a lot of work and often difficult to produce a second time once you find a combination of flavors you like.

A team of designers and developers that call themselves “Cargo,” from Belfast, Northern Ireland, have developed a way to move your personal brewery right into your home. The “Brewbot,” as it’s been coined, is all controlled with your iPhone so you can play with different ingredients and recipes to create different flavors of beer.

The original version of Brewbot. (Image via Cargo)

In order to automate the brewing process, Cargo used the electronic prototyping platform Arduino, which allowed them to manipulate different methods of software and hardware. The team used a stainless-steel setup with copper piping but tried to use as many off-the-shelf components as possible to reduce costs.

They are so serious about their project that the members moved to Portland, OR, since it’s considered the micro-brewery capital of America.

How Brewbot works

Here’s how the brewing robot works, broken down into eight steps.

1. Buy your ingredients.
2. Set up your recipe in the app.
3. Connect your iPhone to Brewbot.
4. Select the recipe you’d like to use.
5. Select “Start Brew.” This automatically adds the exact amount of water that needs to be heated.
6. When the water is heated, it releases into the mashtun. The mashtun converts the starches in the grains into sugars.
7. At the end of this process, the liquid that is extracted from that process (known as wort) is cooled from 212ºF to 72ºF.
8. The liquid is drained into stainless steel tanks and fermentation begins.

The prototype can brew over five gallons of beer at once and will save you money, too. Cargo estimates that you can brew your own beer for 42 cents per 12-oz bottle (much cheaper than your local beer distributer).

 
Most current version of Brewbot. (Image via Cargo)

The Brewbot app includes a recipe platform so you can play with recipes and find one you like. The Brewbot communicates with the iPhone via Bluetooth so you can receive feedback and updates alerting you how much longer you have to wait for the brew to ferment or when you need to add grain.

Brewbot app for the iPad. (Image via Cargo)

Brewbot is equipped with sensors for flow, load, and temperature, runs on 240 V of power and is currently only compatible with the iPhone.

In the future, Cargo aims to develop models that are compatible with Androids and other devices.

The team has set up a Kickstarter campaign to gain support and have everyone brewing right from their homes. The campaign ends on October 22, 2013, so there’s still time left to support the project if you’re interested.

Learn more about Brewbot.