As homebrewing becomes more and more common we keep running across new ways to do it. Here’s another one brought to you by MAKE using Arduino!

Home-brewing can be summarised in the hobby of “make beer 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 makers and 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-brewing experience 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 many forums, blogs or magazines talking about the hobby there is almost always a section dedicated to DIY equipment…

After many different experiment in the past with different technologies I came across the Arduino, and at least to me, it seems the 5th ingredient for beer making—together with 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 start other—more advanced—projects. During one of these initial projects I met another Italian guy who shared a similar passion 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 Petrone and Masimo Nevi I’m very proud to present Open Ardbir. It is a 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.

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