We like anything running on arduino, especially brewing equipment!

What is arduino you ask?  Well, I've been hearing this word connected to cool projects for a while now and come to find out, it's a small computer board that can be programmed to help computers sense the physical world around them. This can come in the form of a robot (like the Mars rover), a weather station, or hundres of other cool applications.

BrewPi uses arduino magic as an open source fermentation controller. It can control your beer temperature with 0.1 degree precision, log temperature data in nice graphs and is fully configurable from a web interface.  Read about it here.

If there is magic in beer, it comes from the little microorganisms called yeast and their ability to produce alchohol from sugar. Many factors contribute to their success (or failure) and understanding what these are can be tricky.  We consider the following to be the most important:

• Temperature
  
• Pitch Rate
  
• Aeration (Adding oxygen before the lag phase)
  
• Use a pure, clean yeast strain

Want to check out some tips and tricks on the care and use of yeast? 
Here's a nice guide we found written by a UK company called Fermentis that details just that!

Thanks to shiveringjemmy over on reddit for posting this fascinating look at a brewing notebook/journal belonging to Thomas Benson in the Benson family fonds. Thomas Benson was a businessman and the first mayor of Peterborough, Ontario.

A Transcription of these pages can be found at the bottom.

To Brew Five Gallons Strong Beer
Take Three ounces of Hops, and rub them well into a close vessel sprinkling on them, when rubbed, about a teaspoon-full of salt, then pour on boiling water sufficient to saturate them and cover close. 

Boil Two and a half Gallons Water, dash the boil with cold water and suffer it to cool down to 180° Faht. Pour it into your Mash-tub, and put in a peck of good Malt. Mash it well till the malt is thoroughly wetted, and allow it to stand close covered about two hours, then run the liquor off into a vessel prepared to receive it, having first of all placed a whisp of clean hay or straw over the hole in your Mash-tub to prevent the Malt running off with the liquor. If at first the liquor should run off thick or discoloured pour back until it runs clear. Mash the second time in the same quantity of water at 190° and let it stand covered two hours. 

Get up your first wort into the boiler and add the Hops, a quarter of a pound of liquorice root (previously bruised), ¼ ounce Capsicum, a bit of Cinnamon, and three ounces Treacle. Boil smartly for an hour, then run off into a cooler, carefully straining out the hops to be boiled in the second wort, which must also be boiled an hour. Observe that your malt must not stand dry between the mashings but must be Kept constantly moist by lading the liquor over it. Run off the second liquor into the cooler, and cool down as quickly as possible to 65° then run it into the tun as quick as you can so that it shall suffer no diminuation of heat, and add sufficient yeast to cause fermentation. Let it work till it comes to a good deep head and has attenuated about 8°, then cleanse it by adding about a quarter ounce of ginger and rousing it well.

The liquor is now fit for putting into the Keg, which must be done carefully. The Keg must be quite full to let the yeast work over, adding fresh liquor to Keep it full till it has done working, then bung it up close but take care to watch it well lest it should begin to work again and burst the Keg, which may be prevented by easing the keg. The only thing that now remains is to fine the beer. Finings are made by dissolving Ising-glass in the Stale Beer till it acquire a thin gluey consistency like sire, the beer in which the ising-glass is dissolved must be quite stale and very clear. Add a sufficient quantity of this to clear your beer a gill will sometimes be sufficient but it may require more.

It's not too late to brew a nice batch of pumpkin ale for the fall and whether you're all-grain or extract, adding real pumpkin is bound to take it up a notch.

Here's a nice video from Northern Brewer on how to use fresh or canned pumpkin.

The only problem I see with the R2DKEG (built by Barton Gilley from LSU) is that EVERYONE will be pouring a beer and it'll be kicked in about 5 minutes.

Operation Teapot sounds like a mission I'd be going on after R. Lee Ermey finds a jelly donut in my foot locker!

This operation was actually conducted by the U.S. Government and was all about testing the affects of nuclear radiation on soft drinks and beer. Reportedly, they placed groups of bottles and cans in two locations, one less than 1/4 mile from the detonation site and another other around 2 miles out.

A document dated January 24th, 1957 states, "Consideration of the problems of food supply show the needs of humans for water, especially under disaster conditions, could be immediate and urgent. At various times some consideration has been given to special packaging of potable water, but since packaged beverages, both beer and soft drinks, are so ubiquitous and already uniformly available in urban areas, it is obvious that they could serve as important sources of fluids."

I think we can all agree that beer serves as an important source of fluid. What you'll have a harder time convincing me of is how the hell we decided who drinks the exposed beer! The people who did sample it gave varied opinions ranging from "commercial quality" to "definitely off". 

Then again, I've brewed beer that was "definitely off" so I think that would have excluded me as a test subject.  haha

Check out more details in the [Original Post].

When it's not convenient to mount a tower directly to the keezer or collar mount the taps as many people do, this usually means a long "trunk" line is used to transport the beer from keg to tap. 

This presents a new problem however, because these long lengths of tubing must be cooled or you risk a warm first pint of beer. There are a few different ways to accomplish this and we like what stan b has done in his article below.

Spoiler alert...he calls the little guy R2-GlyCool which should make any self respecting patron of the Star Wars Cantina happy.

"Greetings all. I wanted to share my success (and prior failures) with glycol cooling of my tap lines.

First, a little background: My keezer is in the basement, and taps are on the first floor, almost directly above the keezer. The total run of insulated trunk line is about 10 feet. I've got five 5/16" product lines (two currently used) and two glycol 1/2" lines (supply and return). Everything in the trunk line is wrapped together with packaging tape. The insulation is 1/2" thick pipe insulation from McMaster. The tap box is insulated with 1/2" pink foam insulation. To cool the tap box I've simply got a loop of the 1/2" glycol line running around inside the box. I've already got plans to rebuild the tap box (just not happy with version 1), and when I do, I'm going to borrow some design ideas from Micro Matic's Kool-Rite design. (Google their site if you need more info on that)."
[Read More]

I'm not sure whether we've reached the pinnacle of laziness or if this is the perfect gift for the blind friend who has everything. Either way, there are two things that are safe to say.

First, I like things that talk. Second, there is probably not a brewer out there who doesn't have a measuring cup in their brew kit.  Combine them both and you have my attention! It's made of unbreakable frosted plastic and is microwave and dishwasher safe.

At $59.95 there are other things I'd rather have, but I genuinely appreciate the ingenuity and who knows, maybe my wife will see this and buy one for my bday!

Get your very own here at Coolest Gadgets.

Faery tales and legend say you'll find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow... Myth BUSTED!

This one has nothing to do with beer but I had to post it for you because...well, it's priceless.

A big part of homebrewing beer involves sharing information. If you are like us, you probably started with a beer kit and hoped for the best. Maybe you were lucky and had a friend who was already brewing show you the ropes. Either way, there usually comes a point in every brewer's journey when they want to learn more. 

Fortunately, brewing Information is everywhere. Books, magazines, forums, websites, and community events are just a few of the resources you can use to take brewing to the next level.

We recently discovered an excellent website that serves as a portal to all kinds of homebrewing related information. It's called Brew Streams and the idea in a nutshell is to pull in feeds from all around the web and display them in a clean, streamlined manner. The streams are updated automatically and offer a great mix of written, audio, and video content. Some of the categories include forum threads, you tube videos, website articles, podcasts and more. There are also completely separate sections for craft beer and cider, all with their own feeds!

I think my favorite feature has to be the quick loading tooltips that come up as you mouseover over each item. This makes it super easy to scan through content. 

The only suggestion I have, and this may be coming in a future update, is the ability to customize exactly which sections are shown. I'm pretty sure this would require logins (or at least cookies) and more management for the developer, but just thought I'd throw it out there.

Check Brew Streams out here and let us know what you think!