Automation in Moderation

Brewing beer is an art that requires skill and experience. Our goal is to provide tools to enhance those skills, rather than replace them. The idea isn’t to automate every process, but help the brewer brew a better beer by providing them with more measurements and insight into each step.

Why Automated Hopping?

Some IPAs require continuous hopping during the boil. For 5 - 6 gallon batches, and you have between 5 - 10oz of hops, this means tossing a pellet into the boil every few seconds. Just the idea of that sounds monotonous. Instead, we’d like to build an automated hopper to do this for us.

Where to Start

We’d like to build something that can be used extensibly. Something that we could plug other sensors and tools into in the future and manage all of them from a central hub. With that in mind, we’re going to use a Raspberry Pi 3. For the hopper we’ll attach a DC server motor to the Raspberry Pi, with the idea that we could attach temperature sensors and timers in the future to monitor other aspects of the boil.

What we Need

Now that we’ve landed on using the Raspberry Pi, we need to design and build the hopper. Since this is a prototype, we don’t need to think about making a hopper that meets all of our preferences, just one that proves the concept is valid. We’re going to use a PVC tube to hold the pellets with a valve at the end of the tube, attached to the servo, to dispense the pellets. Lastly we’ll need a way to fasten the hopper to the side of the kettle.