PicoBrew Announces The PicoBrew Zymatic
After over 3 years in development, PicoBrew LLC has officially unveiled the first automatic all-grain beer brewing appliance, the ZymaticTM. The PicoBrew ZymaticTM brews high-quality craft beer at the touch of a button: simply load water, grain and hops, select a recipe, and brew. This new microwave-oven-sized home internet appliance also connects to the web to load and share recipes and allow remote monitoring and logging of brewing sessions.
The company's founders - brothers Dr. Bill Mitchell and Jim Mitchell are avid home-brewers with backgrounds in computer science and physics+chemistry respectively. Bill spent the past 18 years as an executive at Microsoft pioneering internet appliances and wearable computing while Jim spent over a decade designing food processing plants and equipment inCalifornia. They teamed up with co-founder and ex-Microsoft hardware architect Avi Geiger to invent a process and build an appliance that would simplify and automate all-grain home brewing. Their vision was to make home-brewing as simple and easy as using an espresso maker or bread maker while at the same time preserving the fine art and craft of high-quality home beer creation.
The PicoBrew ZymaticTM brews all-grain beer from 3 basic ingredients: cracked grain (typically barley), hops and water. Set up time to brew a batch of beer averages 15 minutes and involves filling a keg with water, filling a "step filter" drawer with grain and hops, and selecting a recipe which guides the machine's brewing process. After setup the automated PicoBrewing process proceeds unattended for 3.5 hours (typical), then completes by depositing finished beer wort (unfermented beer) into a keg. At this point the wort may be fermented by adding yeast, securing an airlock, and placing the keg in a cool environment for 1-2 weeks (typical).
The PicoBrew ZymaticTM is capable of brewing 2.5 gallons of high quality finished beer across the range of BJCP styles from light lagers through IPAs, stouts and smoked ales. Hundreds of test batches brewed during the product development process on prototype machines has enabled PicoBrew's recipe creation software to accurately predict brewing outcomes based on recipe ingredients and process steps (e.g. mash time/temp) allowing precise, repeatable outcomes. Cleanup as well is greatly simplified: empty the step filter contents into a yard waste or trash receptacle, run a water rinse cycle on the ZymaticTM, and place the step filter in the dishwasher.
PicoBrew LLC has successfully turned to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to finance final production steps for the product. As the ZymaticTM creates an entirely new market for home brewing appliances, releasing the product to early adopters on Kickstarter at introductory prices as low as $1299 has been key to the successful launch of this product. Since Sept 30PicoBrew has raised over $340,000 (> 225% of goal) with 20 days remaining in their campaign.
