Homebrewing and Arduino: the perfect recipe (2024)

Home-brewing can be summarised in the hobby of “makebeer at home” and for sure is a wide spread passion all over the world including Italy where I live. Home brews are basically small scale craft beer makersand generally speaking people passionate not only in food and beverage but also DIY enthusiast that love experiments, recipe creation, row material transformation, process control and all the typical makers attitude.

I don’t know if is the process of beer making, that is typically a step process with support of specific technology, or the typical mindset of the home brew, but as a matter of fact almost all home brewers are very proud of building their own instruments and equipment. In my long home-brewingexperience I have found that one of the common passion in the community is the self-building and DIY of the equipment needed for beer production. In the manyforums,blogs or magazines talking about the hobby there is almost always a section dedicated to DIYequipment.

On the internet you can find plans for almost any possible device needed for automation and control of the beer making process—in some cases these tryto emulate and scale the professionalequipment, but sometimes even more advanced and creative!

I’m definitely part of this DIY home brewing community, and sometimes I’m asking myself if I enjoy more the construction of a new beer gadget or beer making…or even beer drinking!

After many different experiment in the past with different technologies I came across theArduino, and at least to me, it seems the 5^th ingredient for beer making—togetherwith water, barley malt, hop and yeast. The marriage of Arduino with brewing is perfect… perhaps because I live in Ivrea, not so far from the Arduino started.

I tried first to port all my basic systems—based on standard off the shelf technology such as the PID thermo regulator, and PWM controller—into the Arduino ecosystem so that I can startother—more advanced—projects.Duringone of theseinitial projects I met anotherItalian guywho shared asimilarpassion passion for beer, the same ideas, and same love for the Arduino. Everything stared from a post of mine on an Italian blog… this stimulate people to enhance and develop my initial “all in one ” brewing system idea and from another similar Arduino-based project in Australia from Stephen Mathison.

Thanks to the massive and fundamental contribution of Salvatore Petroneand Masimo Nevi I’m very proud to present Open Ardbir. It isa control system to fully automate the beer production process with a single vessel brewing system (RIMS).

The core of the system is an Arduino Uno and a shield has been developed in order to connect temperature probe, the SSR relay for heating element, the Pump relay, and a buzzer, as well as an LCD display and 4 push buttons for interaction and programming.

You can useitmanually like a PID controller, or in a full automated process, in this case once the user has set the recipe parameters and started the process they areguided step by step from initial set up, to mashing, boiling and hop addition. Every step and operation are clearly highlighted in the display and trough sounds

Eachparameter can be customised in system configuration menu and recipe can be saved for future reuse. The home-brewer can use the Open Ardbirin their own set up and there are many different hardwareimplementation around thecontroller since the integration is quite easy (PUMP / temperature sensor and heating element).

The entire project is Open Source and all the files and info can be found on the GitHuband on ourfacebook page.Have a great “automatic” brew with Open Ardbir.