Engineering news
Samuel Khamis knows his company has developed what many men would consider the ultimate gadget, a robot that brews beer. But his confidence about his product isn’t just attributable to well-placed faith in the male predilection towards beer.
He’s also rather pleased that the Belfast-based firm shipped its first Brewbot this month. The company, also called Brewbot, launched its first prototype two and a half years ago on crowdfunding website Kickstarter. More funding and much more engineering development later, the automated mini-brewery is finally on the market for £6,900.
The idea for an automated microbrewery, suitable for domestic use, emerged from a group of brewing enthusiasts at the internet technology company Cargo. The first prototype was a basic Arduino electronics board connecting a sensors and a smartphone via software.
Khamis, who is chief scientific officer at Brewbot, says: “By and large brewing has always been a process that hasn’t been reproducible. It’s a very manual process. We are taking the manual part out.”
The unit measure around four by two foot wide and produces beer in 25 litre batches. It can hold up to 45 litres of beer. Brewing with Brewbot takes around 4 and a half hours on a brew day, with all of the measuring and temperature monitoring performed by the system. Prompts for actions, such as the addition of ingredients, and monitoring by the brewer, are sent via Wi-Fi to a smartphone. It then takes up to a week to ferment.
There are partnerships with brewers to make beers already available, or recipes can be tweaked or made up. Recipes are built into the app and can be bought and delivered using your smartphone. The recipe is via a visual representation of the beer, data which contains its characteristics, like a barcode, and ensures exact replication of the beer.
The Brewbot can be used by home enthusiasts - the beer produced is a fraction of the cost of current prices. Another selling point is that if you go travelling and taste a beer you enjoy, you can then reproduce it at home. The company also believes it can disrupt traditional business models and is targeting restaurants and bars.
“If you look at how beer happens, the distribution network represents about $24 billion a year. With a Brewbot you download the recipe, brew it and serve it,” says Khamis. “We are changing its distribution from the shipping of liquid around in trucks and boats to the digital distribution of beer.”
The Brewbot hardware and software has been developed by a team of 20 people. “There have been a lot of design challenges. How do you handle water to get the right feedstock and temperature for example – water varies a lot in composition from region to region. We’ve done a lot of thermal and flow testing and had to solve a lot of mechanical problems.
Engineers also considered safety. The hottest the outside of the Brewbot gets is 30°C, and it is only warm during the brewing process. The fermentation vessel is “smart” and connected, automatically monitoring rate, temperature and alcohol by volume. Kegging and bottling is achieved manually. Khamis says: “We get the data back about what beer is being made. It’s a smart connected brewing system.”
The first hundred Brewbots are being built in-house at Belfast, but Khamis says that manufacturing of the units in the future will be done locally. Then, early next year the company plans to start selling the “Brewbot Core” a stripped down system that can be retrofitted to brewing apparatus to enable remote monitoring, control and automation.