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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pico C

PicoBrew Rolls Out Cold Brew Coffee Capability For the Pico C

Sure, beer is great and all, but those of us with day jobs can’t exactly drink round the clock (or can we?).

Luckily for those of us with the PicoBrew Pico, we can now use the countertop beer maker to brew up batches of cold brew coffee. The new feature, announced today, is made possible via a software upgrade and the addition of a new Pico reusable cold brew coffee filter available for $4.99 on the PicoBrew website. New customers will also get cold brew filters out of the box with a purchase of the Pico C craft beverage bundle.

PicoBrew’s move into cold brew isn’t all that surprising after enabling the beverage on their high-end Pico Z system and teasing the feature on the canceled Pico U.

From the announcement:

The new offering highlights PicoBrew’s expansion from a beer-focused, single-appliance company to a total craft beverage company with a complete line of beverage appliances and accessories that can make everything from coffee and kombucha to craft spirits like gin and whiskey.

While the Pico technically ended its status as a one-trick drink pony when it introduced kombucha, cold brew is the appliance’s first non-fermented beverage. Basically what this means is that, for the first time, a Pico user can make a drink and have it the same day (beer made with the Pico takes a minimum of a week to ferment). According to PicoBrew, a batch of cold brew coffee will be available two hours after the start of a brew cycle. Once brewed, the coffee is then stored and dispensed through the Pico mini-kegs.

The cold brew feature is also the first move for the Pico towards a more open brewing system where the user can make drinks with their own ingredients. While we saw hints of this last summer when Bill Mitchell told me there was an interest in bring-your-own-beer ingredients for the Pico U, cold brew coffee is a logical first step in this direction since  ‘bring-your-own’ is pretty much how everyone makes coffee.

The Pico is hardly the first company to make a home cold brew coffee maker. Toddy has been selling essentially the same old-school cold brew makes for decades while Cuisinart and others have been attempting to “appliance-ize” cold brew for a couple of years. That said, the Pico is certainly the first home appliance to do both beer and cold brew in the same box.

A Smart Kitchen Gift Guide for Last-Minute Shoppers

Well, you’ve done it. You’ve waited until the last minute to do your Christmas shopping and now it’s here. But don’t worry! Your friends at The Spoon have you covered. Here’s a Smart Kitchen Gift Guide for your favorite cooking companions packed with items you can still get before the big day.

Sous Vide Wand: The Joule was on our 2016 gift guide, but really either it or the Anova is a wonderful addition to your kitchen cabinets. Sous vide elevates cooking proteins like steak to another level, yet is versatile enough to make a range of foods including pies and cookies.

Hestan Cue System: If you’re like me, you enjoy deliciousness, but aren’t that great a cook. Enter the Hestan Cue system. It’s a combination of induction burner, pan and smartphone app that work together to provide you with guided cooking, so you can turn from average Joe Cook into Julia Child.

Nutribullet Balance: Smoothies are a delectable treat, but they aren’t always as *nutritious* as we’d like to believe. Give the gift of a healthy 2018 with the Nutribullet Balance, a Bluetooth smart blender with companion app that calculates the nutritional value of your smoothie as you add ingredients.

Ember Mug: Disclaimer, we have not tried this $80 coffee mug, but we loved it’s $150 traveling counterpart. The idea of keeping our hot coffee or tea at the perfect temperature is way too tempting. It’s too late to order online, but you can check your local Starbucks to see if it’s in stock.

PicoBrew PICO Model C: Is there a hop head homebrewer in your family? It’s not cheap, but PicoBrew makes it easy to brew beer from the comfort of your own kitchen. The Pico C is available via Amazon and in brick and mortar retailers.

Amazon Key Kit: For the adventurous early adopter, give them the gift of Amazon delivery people entering their unattended home! Snark aside, Amazon Key’s kit includes a cloud connected security camera and lock (hopefully they’ve patched the security hole) and gives users (in select areas) the ability to accept grocery and other Amazon deliveries when they’re away from home.

Dash Egg Cooker: Okay, so this device isn’t “connected,” but it is a smart idea for anyone who likes hard boiled eggs. Forget waiting for a pot of water to boil and timing when the eggs are done. The Dash Egg Cooker has been a game changer in my house, cooking up six hard boiled eggs in around 20 minutes.

Whatever you decide to get friends and family this year, everyone at The Spoon wishes all of you the happiest of holiday seasons.

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PicoBrew Expands Beyond Beer By Adding Kombucha To The Menu

Once the domain of hippies and diehard health foodies, kombucha is making a major impact on the world of ready-to-drink beverages. It is made with a simple fermentation process that uses tea, sugar, water and a gelatinous mushroom-like culture called a scoby. One global research firm estimates the fizzy, probiotic drink will hit close to $4.5 billion in sales this year. Major soft drink firms like Pepsi have bought into the future of this market, purchasing kombucha brewer KeVita, in Nov. 2016.

Seattle-based PicoBrew, a Kickstarter darling, cleverly seized an opportunity to add kombucha brewing to its upcoming Model C (the original Pico, the Model S, will also brew kombucha). It can be accomplished without adding any new circuitry or hardware to its new home beer brewing appliance. Custom kombucha packs, composed of tea, sugar and some form of starter, are manufactured by noted Woodinville, Wash, farm-to-fork venue Herbfarm.

Adding kombucha brewing to its new model, which has an expected September delivery, was a natural evolution for co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jim Mitchell. Mitchell is a veteran food chemist, with a wealth of knowledge in the areas of prebiotics, probiotics, and fermentation. While adding kombucha to its product line is a new feature, such ideas have been on the mind of Mitchell for years.

“Some 10 years ago, I believed in the goal that the revolution of food and beverage can actually can be more than sustenance it can be healthy,” Mitchell told the Spoon.

Making kombucha is a different and simpler process than brewing beer. It begins with brewing tea in purified water, by boiling and letting it cool to room temperature. When it reaches the boiling point, sugar is added.

Once cooled, the tea/sugar mix is put in a jar or other vessel at which point that extraterrestrial substance called a scoby is added. For optimal results, some kombucha from a previous batch is added to jump-start the fermentation process. The jar is covered with a towel and set in a cool, dark place to ferment. There are many schools of thought and variations of the final steps, but, in general, it takes about two weeks to reach proper fermentation and is ready to drink. For more information on all things kombucha, you can head over to Kombucha Network.

The Model C’s kombucha function will include the tea, sugar and some form of starter but not the scoby. Mitchell said the company has not finalized how it will lead customers to find scobys. The possibilities include linking them to companies that offer scoby starters or building a community of kombucha brewers who are often more than willing to share their starters. After each brewing session, scobys, the “mother”, multiplies and develops additional “babies”.  As a result, many home artisans accumulate large numbers of these cultures and are glad to share them.

Wisely, the PicoBrew team has decided to enter the kombucha space in baby steps. “Our aim is to introduce people to kombucha – people who would not think pf brewing their own,” Mitchell explained. “As they get to the point of using their own tea they can segue into (the full process of) home kombucha brewing themselves.”

PicoBrew’s current record-breaking Kickstarter campaign is more than 200% subscribed with $817,061 raised with an intended goal of $350,000. In addition to adding kombucha brewing, the company announced it would have a sous vide adapter available for its new appliance. According to the PicoBrew’s crowdfunding page, the new Model C will ship in August.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

A Look At The New Machine Washable Pico C Keg

This morning I wrote about PicoBrew’s new Kickstarter campaign and their new lower-priced Pico C homebrew appliance (starting at $279).

While much of the focus for PicoBrew in this most recent product launch was reaching a more affordable price for new brewers, the company also focused on making the process of home brewing a little easier. This effort included a new brew app as well as a new beer subscription service, but perhaps the biggest step forward in ease-of-use is the new Pico C Keg.

What’s the difference with the C Keg and the older ball-lock model that came standard with the original Pico? For one, the connectors move away from a ball-lock model to a much simpler hose-barb connector.  According to PicoBrew CEO Bill Mitchell, newer brewers often will neglect to fully lock in the ball-lock connectors on the older model, so the newer connectors should eliminate that possibility.

But perhaps the biggest difference is the new Pico C’s removable lid and machine washability. One of the challenges with home brewing is the need for home brewers to make sure equipment is really clean, which usually requires special cleaners that need to be purchased at a local homebrew store or speciality retailer online. With the Pico C Keg, the need for special cleaners are eliminated since you can just drop in the dishwasher.

Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the need for cleaners for serving kegs, but one step at a time, right?

You can watch PicoBrew’s Bill Mitchell explain the new C Keg in the video below.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

PicoBrew Debuts All-You-Can-Brew Subscriptions With New Lower-Priced HomeBrew Appliance

Today PicoBrew announced the latest addition to their connected homebrew appliance lineup, the Pico C, in a newly launched Kickstarter campaign. Alongside the lower-priced entry, the company also is debuting BrewUnlimited, an all-you-can-brew subscription service for $59 a month.

The newest Pico is a cost-reduced version of the Pico S, the original Pico model. By offering their new beer brewing appliance at $549 retail (and starting at $279 for Kickstarter backers), the company is looking to make the homebrewing more affordable to those who may have been curious about trying tech-enabled brewing but were unwilling to drop the $800 required with the previous generation. At these lower prices, chances are both existing home brewers who may have been reluctant to abandon their traditional methods and homebrew-curious newbees will be more likely to take the plunge.

In order to make the latest version of their homebrew appliance more affordable, the company made slight modifications such as replacing the all stainless steel exterior with a black powder-coated exterior and a slightly lower fidelity OLED screen.

Today the company is also introducing its first subscription service called BrewUnlimited. The service will cost $59 a month and will allow a Pico user to brew as many PicoPaks as they wish per month (with the only limit being the customer can have only two unbrewed PicoPaks at any given time).

In an interview, company CEO, Bill Mitchell told me the thinking behind the new all-you-can-brew plan.

“We’re committed to make sure people will see new PicoPaks they want to brew,” he said. According to Mitchell, the company is adding new PicoPaks based on recipes from craft brewers at a rate of five per week, and the BrewUnlimited plan will allow Pico users to explore these new beer recipes more freely.

“It’s like Netflix for beer,” said Mitchell.

As with any subscription plan, the individual user will need to do the math and see if they brew enough to make it worthwhile. Mitchell told me the typical Pico user brews two PicoPaks per month. With the typical PicoPak costing about $23-$25, the new subscription service makes sense for anyone who brews three times a month or more.

The BrewPulse App

With this announcement, the company is also adding its first mobile app. Called BrewPulse, the app will allow you to order new PicoPaks as well as monitor the progress of the brew. While much of the monitoring by the app is based on standard timelines for fermentation, the new app will be able to make more precise estimates of the fermentation curve progress if the homebrewer leaves the fermentation keg next to the new Pico. According to Mitchell, the Pico C has an ambient temperature sensor that will be able to help better predict progress. In short, higher temperature means faster fermentation.

The company is also introducing a newer, simpler brew keg. The Pico C keg, which unlike the older ball-lock kegs, is dishwasher safe. The newer keg, which is the same volume (1.75 gallons) as the old keg will have simplified connectors.  According to Mitchell, there will be conversion kits available for those with a Pico S so they can also use the Pico C keg.

Update: You can watch a video of the new Pico C Keg here.

Related: The Complete Pico Home Beer Brew Appliance Review

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.