PicoBrew

January 9, 2017

AB InBev & Keurig Team Up to Create Home System For Beer & Cocktails

While companies such as Picobrew and Whirlpool’s Vessi were showcasing their high-tech methods for brewing beer at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, two giants of the beverage industry confirmed a partnership that could shake up the market for home-based brewers. AB InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer, and JAB Holdings, the corporate parent behind the Keurig pod-based drink system, announced they are teaming up to create a home-brewing system that can deliver beer and spirits to consumers.

The deal should come as no surprise given that JAB Chief Executive Olivier Goudet is also the chairman of AB InBev.

The announcement leads to more questions than answers, but the partnership is likely to take advantage of the technology behind Keurig’s Kold machine which offered single-serve sodas. Considered a bust, Kold was discontinued in the summer of 2016 when customers who owned the product were given refunds. Some of the Kold features, such as “Party Mode,” which allowed a user to crank out more than 30 drinks in a row, will be useful for the new unit.

The new appliance will be able to serve beer, spirits, cocktails and mixers. Given that those beverages require vastly different brewing methods, In-Bev and JAB might be looking at two machines. Beer requires a lengthy fermentation process which would be challenging to distil into an on-demand dispenser. For beer lovers, the two companies could develop a popularly priced home-fermentation machine along the lines of Whirlpool’s Group W Indiegogo project, Vessi. Such a machine might carry the branding of AB InBev’s popular Budweiser or Stella Artois, targeting the fan bases of those already popular brands.

The AB InBev/JAB Holdings partnership will have little impact on the higher-end home beer brewing market. Entrepreneurs looking to build DIY systems are focused on experienced hobbyists who want to create highly customized brews. Home brew masters are rarely novices and are more likely to want machines that allow them to focus more on the art of brewing rather than the mechanical process. The brewing appliance created by the new partnership will target those wanting to up their home entertaining game rather than sophisticated drinkers.

The Keurig for the cocktail set is an easier play for the two companies, with a retooled and improved version of the Kold (a 2.0) ready to tackle that segment. The robotic bartender market is already well established with such companies as Barbotics, Blend Bow and Bartesian already creating interest with early adopters. Bartesian is making cocktails in second utilizing a proprietary cocktail capsule. Neither InBev nor JAB owns any companies in the spirits business, but plenty of brand names in that space would be eager to partner with someone able to crack the mass market with an adult beverage Keurig machine.

On the surface, building a market for home beer making could appear to be a conflict for In Bev. In actual practice, companies such as Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts and even JAB’s Peet’s Coffee did not lose branded-store customers when they expanded their reach to include retail channels and Keurig K-Cups. In fact, by allowing beer drinkers to enjoy a fresh Bud or Stella from their home taps could extend customer brand loyalty to bars and restaurants. The challenge for the two companies will be to create an easy-to-use set of ingredients and recipe to replicate the branded brews while allowing the advanced home brewer the opportunity to put his or her signature touch on the final product.

One thing is certain—anything proprietary that results from AB InBev/JAB alliance will be more closely guarded than Keurig’s original K-Cup design. The patent for Keurig’s single-serve pods expired in 2012 because of the ambiguous wording of its original claim. Failure to protect its IP cost the company billions as competitors lined up to create pods for the popular machine.

January 4, 2017

PicoBrew Will Now Let You Customize Your Brew With FreeStyle PicoPaks

While PicoBrew’s second generation home brew appliance, the Pico, made significant leaps forward in approachability when compared to the company’s first home-brew machine in the Zymatic, it also sacrificed one really cool feature: the ability to customize your home brew.

That’s because the Pico uses a pod-system called PicoPaks that come preconfigured with the grains and hops rather than requiring the home brewer to mess with all that him or herself. It makes brewing much easier, but it also means less creativity since you are brewing a pre-configured and pre-measured brew from the PicoPak.

But at CES this week, the company announced the arrival of the FreeStyle PicoPak BrewCrafter, their new online PicoPak configuration tool that allows home brewers to drag and drop ingredients in a virtual PicoPak to create custom homebrews.

Drag and drop beer making is really cool, but unlocking custom beer brewing with the Pico required much more than simply creating a web-based configuration tool. The vast majority of the work was on the back-end manufacturing and assembly of the new custom PicoPaks, where the company has created the ability for a PicoPak to move down the assembly line and get a one-off custom mix of grains tailored by the home brewer through the BrewCrafter tool. This is a significant departure from traditional assembly line production where there’s an emphasis on high degrees of repeatability. PicoBrew CEO Bill Mitchell told me they’ve had some observers who work with automated food production visit their production plant in Seattle and have said they’ve never seen anything like it.

As a Pico owner, I’m pretty excited about FreeStyle PicoPaks. However, I am slightly worried I’ll go overboard with certain ingredients like when I would frequent those Mongolian-style BBQ restaurants where you tell the cook all the ingredients you want on your food, but soon realize three handfuls of hot peppers might not have been such a good idea. It looks like Pico will try to steer amateur brewers like me away from overloading certain flavors as the BrewCrafter will gently nudge you back towards sanity with mix-balances to “ensure creation of a delicious beer recipe.”

For the Pico user, FreeStyle PicoPaks are available now. The BrewCrafter guide holds your hand along the way by provided “know-good” baseline beer recipes for you to tweak with a personal flourish by adjusting grains and hops to change the flavor, alcohol content and more. Admittedly, creating a custom brew in a browser might not satisfy those hard-core home brew types that want to measure grains and hops the old fashioned way to achieve their beer masterwork, but it’s likely those folks probably wouldn’t have bought a Pico in the first place.

And anyway, if you do own a Pico and want greater control over your home brew, you can always buy a Zymatic.

December 12, 2016

PicoBrew: Would You Like Some Steak With That Beer?

If you own a Pico home beer brew appliance like me, you’ll notice the next time you turn it on that one of the menu options alongside brewing beer is sous vide.

That’s because this week PicoBrew is set to release an adapter that enables the Pico to double as a sous vide machine. The software upgrade to the Pico that allows it to work in sous vide mode was rolled out this weekend.

I asked Bill Mitchell why they decided to add a sous vide option to the Pico, and he told me it started when his brother, Jim Mitchell, began to use the original PicoBrew Zymatic as a sous vide machine.

“Jim’s foray into sous-vide meats was the inspiration. He’s a staunch believer in gourmet food and that gourmet beer goes with gourmet food.”

It’s not that surprising that Jim would be food hacking with the PicoBrew. He’s following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who just so happened to invent Pop Rocks and Tang.

When it comes to converting the Pico to a sous vide machine, it helps that sous vide usually requires a water bath, something that the Pico essentially has built in with its step filter, which is the large container which holds the PicoPaks.

But having a water bath built in was the easy part. Making it work took a lot of engineering time.

“There was substantial engineering cost to this because of the way the Pico works with steam injection (vs. the Zymatic),” said Mitchell. “Unlike other Kickstarter project companies, we promised it, so by god we figured out a way to deliver it.”

You can see what sous vide in your PicoBrew looks like below:

The company will send out the sous vide adapters to Kickstarter backers first. All those who have purchased a Pico at retail or in the future will also get the adapter free of charge. The company will include the adapter in the PicoBrew Pico box starting at the beginning of 2017.

November 30, 2016

The Spoon Smart Kitchen 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

It’s time for The Spoon’s first annual holiday gift guide! Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness have passed and it’s really the first year we’ve seen many anticipated smart kitchen devices hit the market, it seemed like the perfect time to roll out our guide. Picking this year’s selections was not easy – the food tech and smart kitchen spaces are packed with great stuff. But we wanted to limit the guide to stuff you could actually purchase (not pre-order or back on Kickstarter, with a few exceptions) and hand to your loved one around or shortly after the holidays.

Now you might be thinking – I’m the one who loves food and tech in our house! The beauty of this guide is that it’s easily forwardable – perhaps send to your spouse or loved ones with a wink emoji and some subtle hints, and you’ll find that smart kitchen gear you’ve always wanted under the tree.

High-Tech Kitchen Help

If you’ve got an amateur chef on your list this year, you can’t go wrong with sous vide. Sous vide is an older cooking technique using warm water to slowly and evenly cook foods like meat, fish and vegetables. Recent devices like the Joule from ChefSteps have increased the popularity of sous vide and made it easy to incorporate into any kitchen.

The Joule itself is a long, cylindrical water circulator and can be easily dropped into a pot of water to prepare food. It looks kind of like a high-tech rolling pin crossed with an Amazon Echo – but the noticeable difference between Joule and other sous vide cookers out there is the lack of a screen. The smartphone app does all the work – including preheating the device to the right temperature. The only thing left for the chef to do is season, seal and place the food in the water. The lack of a screen makes it more lightweight and smaller than other sous vide cookers, an appeal for some who want to minimize space in the kitchen.

Once cooking is complete, the dish can be removed and seared or finished on the stove for a perfect crust. Reviews of the Joule sous vide cooker promise some of the juiciest, most tender (insert food here) you’ve ever had.

Price: $199 on ChefSteps.com
(ChefSteps say they guarantee shipping by the holidays!)

Turn A Beer Fan Into A Brewmaster

Craft beer, spirits and cocktail related gifts are popular for those who like to imbibe around the holidays (…that’s everyone, right?) You could go a step up and get the beer fan on your list their own at home brew system. The folks at PicoBrew created the Pico, a simple pod-based brewing device that allows amateur brewers to customize their favorite IPA, pilsner, stout or pale ale in a week’s time. The PicoBrew PicoPaks and unique system take the mess out of home brewing and fermentation and each contains a different combo of grains, hops and yeast for each craft beer.

The PicoPaks are sold separately but come in over a hundred varieties so it’s easy to pair a few favorites with the system for a killer gift. And unlike older homebrew systems, the Pico’s compact design is ready for prime time – it’s cute enough to sit on the kitchen countertop and has a built-in steam cleaning mechanism. The digital display screen allows the user to adjust alcohol and bitterness levels for any brew and it makes up to five liters of beer at one time.

The Pico is one of those smart kitchen gadgets that will probably win you coolest family member award instantly; you might even get to sample the new brewmaster’s first brew attempt. Check out our complete review of The Pico before you buy.

Price: $799 at Williams-Sonoma

Infuse The Holidays With Perfect Tea

Tea and coffee are common holiday gifts for hot beverage drinkers, but for those who have a special affinity for tea, the smart tea infuser Teforia can create a custom cup of tea brewed to the exact right temperature and strength. The infuser looks like a cross between a traditional coffee maker and a high-tech chemistry set and comes equipped with a propriety technology called the Teforia Selective Infusion Profile System (“Teforia SIPS” ™). Sounds complicated, right? Basically, Teforia has created a device that knows the best way to brew tea, taking into account things like steep time, infusion temperature and the varietal of tea you’re using.

But who really needs a tea infuser? Tea is actually considered most widely consumed beverage in the world next to water and can be found in almost 80% of all U.S. households. Most of us, even avid tea fans (raises hand) use a kettle to boil water and a simple tea bag stuck in a mug. But Teforia claims not all teas are created equal, and consuming tea the typical way actually does the ancient beverage a huge disservice.

So bypass the specialty tea box in the gift shop this year as you’re picking out gifts – chances are, if someone is a fan of tea, the Teforia Infuser, maybe with some of their hand-picked varietals thrown in, will blow their mind.

Price: $1499, starts shipping December 1 if you order on Teforia’s website.

Coffee – Right From Your Phone

Onto the coffee lovers – if you’re a true java fan, you know that there’s not one temp fits all for coffee brewing. What makes a good cup of coffee, well, good, often has to do with extraction, or the process of hot water drawing the flavor from the grounds. It’s a delicate process and water that’s too hot will leave coffee tasting bitter. With the Behmor Connected Coffee Maker, that problem is solved through customizable brew profiles that all coffee drinkers to adjust the brewing temperature and pre-soak time before crafting that perfect cup.

And, as the name suggests, Behmor’s coffee maker comes with a connected smartphone app that allows you to program, adjust and monitor your coffee from the comfort of your bed. The app will even text you when your coffee’s done, thus finally giving you a reason to get out of bed on a cold winter morning. In addition to the custom brew control, Behmor’s actually build in some unique technology to optimize coffee extraction with a pulsed water flow and a grounds basket designed to saturate every single coffee ground.

Pair this with a local coffee blend and you’ve got every java lover’s dream come true.

Price: $234 on Amazon

Give The Gift Of An Oven That Knows Exactly What You’re Cooking

An oven might seem like an odd gift to give someone – unless it’s your spouse and you’re in the middle of a kitchen renovation, I suppose. But what if that oven was packed with enough technology to recognize the food you place in it and know exactly how to cook it? That’s exactly what the June Oven is designed to do.

Early reviews on the June are mixed – and some are even downright harsh – but we still think the June could be an interesting gift for those with money to spare who want the most cutting edge oven tech on the market.

Price: $1495 for pre-order on Juneoven.com

For The Person Who Actually Loves to Cook

So maybe you don’t want to spend over $1k on a magical oven, but you do have someone on your list who likes cooking and is always on the hunt for new recipes. The Drop Kitchen Scale with companion smart app is a good way to dip your toe into the world of connected kitchen gear without breaking the bank. The Drop Scale looks like a basic kitchen scale, but when paired with the app, provides a basic guided cooking system that walks the user through a chosen recipe and helps them weigh out ingredients along the way.

One of the best features of the Drop Kitchen ecosystem is its adaptability. Within the app, you can find and customize a recipe for the exact quantity or taste preference you’d like and the recipe will adjust portions and ingredients for you. So no more guesstimating how much flour you should use for a cupcake recipe you’re trying to half, Drop will give you precise measurements for the amount you need. With so many people using their smartphones and tablets in the kitchen to read recipes, the Drop Kitchen Scale and app will make cooking that much more enjoyable.

Price: $78.98 on Amazon (product is being end-of-lifed as Drop transitions into platform based technology)

Alexa, Finish My Holiday Shopping

Ok, this might not technically be a kitchen-specific gift, but the vast majority of Amazon Echo users I’ve encountered (myself included) keep the device in the kitchen – and for good reason. Alexa isn’t just a helpful virtual assistant, she can also be a pretty handy sous chef. From the very advanced – enable the Allrecipes skill and get step-by-step walk-through of any recipe available on Allrecipes – to the basic – ask Alexa how many teaspoons is in a tablespoon (1 tbl = 3 tsp, handy when your tablespoon constantly goes missing), Alexa is a hands-free help during meal prep.

The other helpful kitchen-specific feature, aside from listening to a news flash, a podcast or Spotify with a simple request, is the shopping list feature. Ask Alexa to add things to your shopping list as you run out of it, ensuring the next trip to the grocery store will result in a full pantry restock.

The Amazon Echo is usually $179.99, but is often on sale (and out of stock) around the holidays.

Connect To Your Tea

Maybe you have a tea lover on your list, but the idea of 800 bucks for the Teforia Infuser isn’t realistic. Before Teforia, there was a device called AppKettle, a connected tea kettle with less bells and whistles, but an easier price to swallow.

AppKettle is a connected tea kettle with a companion app that allows users to heat water on demand, from anywhere. With a nice stainless steel finish and both app and native device controls, this is a nice little upgrade to your traditional tea kettle. With the ability to control the temp of the water, AppKettle might be a perfect gift for new parents on your list who are bottle feeding. There’s nothing worse than waiting for water to heat up while your new baby cries for milk.

Price: AppKettle sadly is only shipping in the UK for around $160, but the CEO told The Spoon they have plans to ship in the US in 2017 with added Alexa integration.

Celebrate The New Year With A Perfect Drink

The season of gift-giving will soon be over which means it’s not too early to be making New Year’s Eve plans. And generally speaking, the most vital part of a good New Year’s Eve at home, whether you’re parenting a toddler and stuck home playing Cards Against Humanity or single and hosting a fancy dinner party with a DJ and a large crowd, are the beverages. And if you’re going to be at home, you want cocktails that taste like they were made by a professional mixologist at a swanky bar, no?

That’s why the Perfect Drink 2.0 Smart Scale and Interactive App make such a great gift – it’s the smart kitchen substitute for an expensive bartending course. The Perfect Drink scale has over 400 drink recipes and walks you through ingredients, letting you know when you’ve poured the perfect amount of each. And if you pour too much, let’s say, gin, Perfect Drink Scale will help you adjust the rest of the ingredients so you don’t ruin the drink. The Cabinet feature lets you keep track of what you have on hand and there are recipes for every season, along with tried and true favorites.

Price: $39.99 on Amazon

Make Spaghetti Out Of….Everything

Tech lover or not, everyone loves a good kitchen gadget that’s useful and helpful without many bells and whistles. I once asked a well-known chef what he couldn’t live without in the kitchen and he said – basically – a good pan and some heat. But the extras can be fun too, which is why we’re putting the spiralizer into our first-ever gift guide.

The spiralizer is one of those low-tech gadgets that has amazing utility and, as a result, has a huge following. It’s basically a handheld device that turns average vegetables into pasta, creating a healthy (and delicious) meal. The spiralizer is best known for its ability to make zucchini spaghetti, but pictures (and testimonials) indicate it can be used to create garnishes and turn other vegetables into a pasta shape, too.

For anyone on your list looking to eat healthier, add this to their stocking and tell them to look forward to a spiralized 2017.

Price: Depends on the model, this basic one is $12.99 on Amazon while this slightly fancier (maybe less labor-intensive version) is $39.95 at Williams-Sonoma.

Read Up On The Future Of Food + The Kitchen

One of my favorite gifts to give and receive are books – you can’t go wrong. And there are a few books in the food tech and food science space that would make excellent presents under the tree.

The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt – The Food Lab is a tour de force – the food bible for anyone looking to infuse science through simple techniques to enhance everyday cooking. The 1000+ page plus recipe book is quite a departure from ordinary cookbooks; authored by Serious Eats managing culinary directorJ. Kenji López-Alt, also a James Beard Award winner, The Food Lab focuses squarely on food science. Looking at the interactions between heat, energy & molecules and how they all work together to create truly delicious food. The techniques to achieving better food aren’t necessarily complicated, and for anyone interested in nerding out over the science behind your favorite recipes, this book is a perfect (and heavy!) gift.

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya – The first Modernist Cuisine book series spawned a cult-like following of the brand and its founder, former Microsoft CTO and technologist turned food connoisseur, Nathan Myhrvold. These books – hundreds of dollars worth – are truly for the hardcore food science nerd, someone who wants to dive deep into the art, science, design, techniques and research on human diet staple: bread. Housed in a stainless steel case, the five-volume series delivers over 1500 recipes, a wire-bound kitchen manual and over 2300 pages of knowledge on bread. While it’s not available until 2017, the right person will swoon over the gift of a Modernist Bread pre-order receipt.

sousvide Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals – From Lisa Fetterman, the founder of Nomiku, one of the first mainstream sous vide machines, Sous Vide at Home just hit the shelves in early November. Sous vide is becoming increasingly popular as a technique using the slow heat of a water bath (described above in our Joule write-up) and this cookbook is a guide to creating chef-quality food using any sous vide device at home. It would pair well with a brand new sous vide machine as a perfect foodie gift.

So there you have it – our first annual holiday gift guide! We hope you find something for every food and tech lover on your list.

Happy Holidays!

November 26, 2016

The Complete Pico Home Beer Brew Appliance Review

If you’re like me, the idea of making beer has always been an intriguing one, but for various reasons – the mess, no time to learn, possible marital discord – you’ve never tried it.

That’s why when I saw the Kickstarter campaign for the Pico, an appliance that uses technology to simplify the process of home beer brewing, I backed it immediately.

The Pico is made by a company called PicoBrew, a startup founded by a couple of Microsoft expats. I’d known of PicoBrew because they had made a home brewing device a few years before the Pico called the PicoBrew Zymatic, a product which I had written about for Forbes. The Zymatic, which I called “a beer brewing kitchen appliance” in my Forbes piece, did automate many of the steps of home beer brewing, but in retrospect is still more targeted at professionals, both in price ($2500 vs. $799 for the Pico) and in complexity compared to the company’s second generation brewing appliance.

The main reason the Pico is less complex than the Zymatic is it utilizes a “pod” system for its grains and hops called PicoPaks. PicoPaks, which run for about $20 and are available through the PicoBrew website, allow you to pick a brew using a recipe from well-known craft brewers such as Rogue (Dead Guy’s Ale) or Populux (Cinderblock) and make it at home. All the necessary grains and hops are included and premixed in the PicoPaks, ready to pop into your Pico for brewing.

That was the promise at least, and I was willing to gamble a little money to see if I could finally realize my dream of home brewing.

The Unpacking

The Pico Box

I received an email notification in August that my Pico was ready, just under a year after I had backed the Pico on Kickstarter. I live in the Seattle area, the same city as PicoBrew, so I drove to the company’s headquarters by the University of Washington and picked up my Pico. A couple hours later, I was home and ready to unbox my Pico.

The standard Picobrew Pico unit comes with the following:

Pico brewing unit
Accessory box – the small accessories needed for brewing with the Pico
PicoPak box – the brew “pods” that include a grain and hops pak as well as some yeast and sugar for post-brew.
Brew keg – the keg you use for brewing and fermenting the beer
Serving keg – the keg where you put the fermented beer, carbonate it and serve it

The accessory box included the small accessories used during the brewing process. Here is what the accessories looked like out of the box.

Pico Brewing Accessories

The Set Up

Before you make beer, you need to do a couple of things. First, you need to find a place to brew. The Pico’s size footprint is similar to that of an espresso machine, so it fits easily on a kitchen counter top. You also need room for the brew keg as that’s where the wort – the brewed concoction before it ferments and has carbonation – will go.

I decided to brew my first beer in an area adjacent to the kitchen on top of a small stand-alone liquor cabinet. You can see the set up below:

Read to brew: the Pico and the brew keg

Once I had the Pico and brew keg set up, I turned on the Pico and connected to my Wi-Fi network. This took all of three minutes.

I then performed the first rinse, the process where you run tap water through the Pico to make sure everything is clean for an initial brew. This process, like the post-brew rinse, is a menu option. Below is a video of my Pico running the initial rinse cycle (this will also give you an idea of the noise level of the Pico):

The Pico Initial Rinse

Watch this video on YouTube

Let’s Brew!

Once you’ve set up your Pico, rinsed it, you’re ready to brew some beer. One thing you will need for your brew is distilled water. I found that the 2.5-gallon containers (the kind with the small little pour taps) are a perfect size, as you need about 2 gallons of distilled water for a full brew.

Next, you’ll want to unbox your PicoPak. The PicoPak comes with the grains, hops, a package of yeast, a packet of sugar (if you want to carbonate naturally), and a CO2 cartridge if you want to force carbonate (which is what I did, which I will explain later).

Below is a picture of my B-52 Blonde Pico GrainPak, HopPak, yeast and sugar packages.

The components of the PicoPak

Once you have the GrainPak and Hops Pak out of the box, you place them into the step filter, the large see-through filter that slides into the Pico. Then you fill the brew keg with distilled water, connect the brew keg to the Pico’s connectors, slide the keg cozy on the brew keg (essentially a keg “sweater” to keep the wort warm during brewing), and seal the top of the keg with the plastic seal.

The Pico set up and ready to brew

Once you are set up, you can also choose the ABV (alcohol by volume) and bitterness of your brew. Once you do that, you are ready to hit brew on the Pico menu.

You can watch the brew progress on PicoBrew.com

You can watch the progress of your brew on PicoBrew.com

This is where the Pico takes over. For the next two hour and a half hours, the Pico takes the brew through all the stages: heating, doughing in, mashing, and boiling. If you’re like me, you’ll monitor the various brew stages on the LED screen, as well as periodically check the progress of the brew on the Picobrew website. There you can find a chart that maps out the progress by time on the x-axis and temperate on the y-axis.

One additional note about the brewing process: Even though the Pico is more automated than traditional homebrewing, you still get much of the sensory experience of homebrewing in the form of smell during the two and half hour brew cycle. A half-hour into my brew, the entire first floor of my house smelled like a small brewery. For me, this is a beautiful smell. For my wife, not so much. So, depending on whether you live someone who likes the smell of beer brewing, you may choose to do your brew when they are not home or move your Pico into the garage.

Cooling and Fermentation

Once the Pico finishes the brewing process, you then disconnect the brew keg from the Pico and put a small red plug into the plastic keg stopper on the top of the keg. You remove the keg cozy/sweater and then set aside the keg for 24 hours to let the wort cool. You’ll then want to run the Pico through the post-brew rinse process, which can be done with tap water and takes about 10 minutes.

Twenty-four hours later you are ready to start fermentation, that process which turns that liquid in the brew keg into tasty alcohol.

You can choose between regular fermentation – which takes about ten days – or fast fermentation, which takes between 3-5 days depending on the beer.

After the wort cools, you pour in the yeast packet and then let the beer ferment for 3-5 days.

I chose fast-fermentation, which meant simply putting in the small red fast-fermentation adapter in the metal lid which goes on the brew keg. I poured the contents of the yeast packet into the brew keg, stirred the contents, and then locked the metal keg lid onto the brew keg. I shook the brew keg to mix up the wort and the yeast and then set aside the keg in my garage for the next four days.

Rack and Carbonation

Depending on the beer and temperature in your home, you will be ready to carbonate after about 4-6 days. The Half-Squeezed IPA I brewed fast-fermented in 4 days, so after waiting four long sleeps I was ready to force-carbonate my beer.

Just as with fermentation, Pico gives you a fast or slow track towards a tasty glass of suds and being anxious to get to my first pint, I chose force carbonation. This means instead of waiting a full ten days for natural carbonation, I chose to use the included CO2 cartridge (one comes with each PicoPak).

Before I could carbonate, I had to rack the beer, which means transferring it from the brew keg to the serving keg. This is done using the Pico appliance and takes about 10 minutes. Before the transfer process, you will transfer some of the initial wort to a waste container, as this allows you get rid of the sediment-heavy beer at the bottom of the brewkeg. Being the curious guy I am, I tried out some of the excess wort and thought it tasted pretty good (if a bit flat – this was before carbonation).

The CO2 Regulator “force-carbonating” the beer

After the wort/pre-carbonated beer is transferred to the serving keg, now you will add the CO2 cartridge to the top using the CO2 regulator which came in the accessories box. This is pretty straightforward and takes just a couple minutes. Then you will put the serving keg into your fridge for 36 hours to carbonate.

And remember to be patient here and let it carbonate for the full 36 hours. I could hardly wait to taste my beer and, after 24 hours, pulled the CO2 and served up a glass. It tasted good, but it was – surprise surprise – a bit flat.

Enjoy Your Homemade Beer

After you patiently wait for 36 hours for your beer to carbonate, you are ready to enjoy an cold glass of homemade, fresh beer.

All you need to do from here is simply take the CO2 adapter off, insert the unfortunately named ‘dispensing bung plug’ into the top of your serving keg and pour yourself a cold one (or two).

Here is what the first pour of my second (more carbonated) brew – the Half Squeezed IPA – looked like.

Look at that beautiful head!

It was delicious!

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really enjoyed the process of brewing beer with the Pico. Using the beer brewing appliance from PicoBrew was easy and yet left enough of the process to make me feel like I was really making beer. I know that there will be beer-brewing enthusiasts who might laugh at that last statement, which is fine. I get it. You’ve put in the hard work and know that doing it the more manual way takes a lot more time and work.

But here’s the thing: I – and lots of people like me – don’t have the time or want to put in the work needed to brew beer at home the old fashioned way. The reality is we would never brew beer at home without something like the Pico and, like it or not, we are making real beer with the Pico, just in a way that takes a lot less work than the traditional method.

I do want to point out that brewing with the Pico had a few hiccups. On my third brew, the Pico failed to heat up properly and so I had to abandon the brew of my Buffalo Sweat oatmeal stout. I contacted the PicoBrew support who responded quickly and, despite not being able to figure out why my first attempt at brewing Buffalo Sweat, they sent out a new PicoPak which I was able to brew a few days later.

I also felt while the brewing guide sent out to Kickstarter backers had great instructions for brewing, it was pretty light on how to clean up properly. I never properly rinsed the racking tube after one of the brews and as a result noticed a slight amount of mold growing in it a week later. Once again, support was very helpful here and showed me how to rinse it and sent out a new racking tube.

Lastly, I want to say that even though I – and many others – have written that PicoBrew and other attempts at automated brewing are, in a sense, the “Keurig-ization” of the craft, I am now of the mind this term is inadequate when it comes to beer brewing automation. The reality is brewing beer takes time, and while the Pico does speed things up significantly, you still have to wait for nature to takes its course with the process of fermentation, carbonation, etc. In short, the term Keurig-ization implies speed and instant gratification, and that’s really impossible when you are creating a fermented beverage of any sort.

Bottom line: If you have $800 to spare and have always wanted to make beer at home, but never had the time or willingness to put up with the mess, I can highly recommend the Pico. It’s not quite the Keurig for beer – for all the reasons I just explained – but that’s a good thing.

You can buy a Picobrew Pico on Amazon or the PicoBrew website.

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November 22, 2016

Libation Liberation: Applying App Distribution & Marketplace Dynamics To Craft Food

One of the most exciting – but undercovered – aspects of food and kitchen tech is how it offers new monetization models for creators. I’m not talking about e-books or other more conventional formats for beer makers, chefs, and mixologists, but instead how creators can harness the power of connected hardware and software to begin to create digital distribution and content license opportunities.

What do I mean by this? As I wrote over at Forbes in a piece focused on craft alcohol, we are beginning to see examples of startups creating licensing models that leverage creative work in the worlds of craft beer and cocktails. While these businesses have been, by necessity, hyperlocal because they produce artisanal food crafts in a specific location at small scale, connected products with associated marketplaces and publishing platforms could change that. By bringing the combination of precision automation and digital distribution to the market through connected hardware, these startups are creating new ways for a bartender or master brewer to get their work out into the world – and around – the world.

As I wrote in Forbes:

PicoBrew’s Mitchell talked about this in the abstract a year ago when they launched the Kickstarter for their new beer brewing appliance, but with their beer brewing appliance now shipping, they’re doing it. They have licensed recipes from over 130 craft brewers across the world and are now pushing out PicoPaks, which are essentially pods with all the grains and hops tailored to the specific recipes of each of these brewers. The owner of a PicoBrew in Boca Raton, Florida can buy a PicoPak with a recipe from a beer brewer in Oregon and have the beer in 5-7 days (how long it takes to make beer with the PicoBrew).

Bartesian is doing something similar with craft cocktails by licensing the recipes and putting into pods.

But it’s not just liquor. ChefSteps, makers of the Joule sous vide cooker, is looking to create a community and influencer recipe platform that would enable a chef to create his or her own branded cooking education, guidance, and community experience. So instead of just writing a blog post for how to make sous vide steak, for example, J. Kenji López-Alt could also have an associated “guided cooking recipe” that offers video and some specific automated instructions for the Joule itself.

Of course, all of this is early, and we have yet to see how any of this can work at scale. However, I do believe applying digital distribution and marketplace dynamics to craft food creation could result in a massive shift and provide new lifelines to creators who have been limited both in geographic reach and scale.

November 20, 2016

(Video) Are Cocktails An Art Form Or Something You Can Delegate To Robots? Both.

Is cocktail making an art form or something you want to let the bots do?

If you’re Ryan Close, the cofounder of Bartesian, the answer is both.

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Close talked about how some people initially resented the idea of letting a robotic drink mixer do the work.

“Early on we had some people at CES thumb their nose at the idea of (automated) cocktails,” said Close. He would tell them that he wasn’t there to tell them how to make a cocktail, and yes, it is an art form, but then suggested that they’re not competing with bartenders or self-styled mixologists, but instead the huge market for ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails, a $3 billion market market growing at almost 7% a year.

RTDs are “high fructose, high sugar,” said Close. Not only that, he said, but bartenderbots make fresher cocktails since they are still local mixology while a mass-produced cocktail is not. RTDs are “batch made; you can’t offer variety to your guests. There is not anything visceral to it, it’s twisting a cap off, whereas the art of mixology is still happening in our machine, you can see the liquor coming in, everything is being reconstituted, so it’s incredibly fresh.”

He also pointed out how bartenders themselves like the idea of using their recipe-driven drink capsules, since it allowed them to do something they’ve never done before: Extend their reach beyond the bar.

“Some of these bartenders who are very proud of what they created, they can only offer it in the restaurant,” said Close. Now, “they can create mixology, and we can put it into our capsules, and they can brand a ‘Nobu Malibu’ line of capsules.’

This recipe licensing model is similar to the one PicoBrew if offering, only instead they license recipes from master brewers at craft breweries from around the world such as Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale.

This allows novices “stand on the should of giants, great brewers, and great recipes,” said Bill Mitchell, PicoBrew CEO, who appeared alongside Close in a panel moderated by Digital Trends Jenny McGrath.

Check out the video above to hear the full session.

November 8, 2016

Dispatches From The Smart Kitchen: Brewing Beer With the Pico

This series explores how new technology is used in real-life people’s home kitchens. It’s one thing to watch a demo on a company website or at the store, but it’s quite another to use them in your own house. These are stories of people who use technology to make delicious food (or beer) for themselves, their families, and their friends.

Name: Luke Murphy

Preferred Technology: Pico and Zymatic from PicoBrew

Other Kitchen Technology: None!

What It Is: The Zymatic is the first fully automatic all-grain beer brewing appliance. You can make your own recipe or brew one from the library. The just-released Pico (from the same company) is the Keurig of home brewing systems: It uses ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits, and it can brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours.

Why: Luke started home-brewing about six years ago, but when his roommate moved out and his girlfriend (now wife) moved in, he stopped his beer-making ways. Needless to say, he missed the process. He bought the Zymatic and got brewin’, and when the Pico came up on Kickstarter, he helped fund it immediately. “I’m an engineer by trade, focused on process and design, so I really appreciated the blend of creativity, science, and process control,” he said. “Not only could I control my process consistently when honing in a recipe but it gave me the time to brew where I wouldn’t otherwise have it.” Beyond that, he liked the idea that the device “allows a smaller brewery an opportunity to broaden their distribution network and get exposure to where they wouldn’t otherwise be able to” (aka your kitchen counter).

How He Discovered It: He met Pico co-founder Avi Geiger through a mutual friend while hanging out at a store dedicated to craft brewing. When he heard what Avi was up to with both devices, he was immediately interested. “The science of understanding contributing variations in the process of brewing and trying to minimize them for consistency is awesome,” he explained. He even convinced his neighbor (who was not a home brewer) to buy a Pico and says it’s fun to watch someone become interested in the science behind beer.

“Not only could I control my process consistently when honing in a recipe but it gave me the time to brew where I wouldn’t otherwise have it.”

Which Is Better: “I liken them to a PC vs. an iPad,” he said. “I can tweak and customize a lot more on a PC/Zymatic, but the iPad/Pico are just simple and easy. Not to mention the Pico shortened the brewing process in half, which is nice.

“Something that was always tricky for me with a traditional homebrew was fermentation. PicoBrew simplifies this greatly by a really clever modification that allows you to ferment under pressure, like a lot of professional brewers. This helps take temperature variation out of the equation when fermenting, making the beer a lot more consistent.” In other words, he can now brew PicoBrew’s adaptation of Deschutes’ Fresh Squeezed IPA and Great Divide’s Yeti Stout with the push of a button. He says he would buy both devices again “without a doubt.”

Favorite Beer to Make: A session IPA that he says he can drink all day while playing cornhole. He’s made it around five times using the Zymatic, all while hanging out in his garage bar, which he’s named the Buffalo in honor of the video of “Guy on a Buffalo” (see above for actual photo and below for infinite amusement, preferably while drinking a beer brewed with the Pico).

Guy On A Buffalo - Episode 1 (Bears, Indians & Such)

Watch this video on YouTube

November 1, 2016

SKS16 Booth Interview: How The PicoBrew Brews Beer

Ever wonder how the PicoBrew makes beer? Carlos Rodela stopped by the beer brewing appliance company’s booth at the Smart Kitchen Summit got a walk-through of the product from the company’s head of marketing, Donald Brewer.

August 14, 2016

The Catalyst Takes Aim At The Mess In Homebrew Fermentation

Homebrewing is a hot area in the smart beverage space. With startups like PicoBrew, a Seattle-based company making complete homebrewing systems designed to take the guesswork and mess out of making beer at home to Alchema, a company that’s crowdfunding a product to make cider at home from fruit and yeast, there’s no shortage of new stuff to report.

The success of these early systems is prompting others to jump in and create products that all serve the growing demand to make alcohol at home. Enter The Catalyst. The Catalyst Fermentation System just a piece of homebrewing equipment that simplifies the fermentation process, making it easier than ever to make great beer at home.

Fermentation is arguably the trickiest part of the home brew process – the temperature of fermentation and the sanitation requirements can make or break a batch. There’s such a need for easier solutions, in fact, that The Catalyst isn’t the first crowdfunding attempt at making fermentation easier for homebrew enthusiasts. Whirlpool, through its W Labs incubator, raised over $220k on Indiegogo earlier this summer for their homebrew fermenter, Vessi.

The Catalyst’s successful Kickstarter campaign is yet again another demonstration for the demand in the market for better homebrew equipment. Touting improved form and function, The Catalyst quickly hit their $50,000 goal and at the time of this piece is closing in on $300k in funding from over 1300 backers. The product is the creation of a homebrew kit and recipe company called Craft a Brew based in Orlando, FL. Looking to give customers an even simpler way to brew at home, Craft a Brew created its first hardware product.

“With the Catalyst, we’ve simplified the steps that come after brewing so you can do all of them without having to siphon, transfer, or use any more tools until bottling day,” the company’s crowdfunding pitch reads. The device allows you to complete several steps in the home brew process all in the same container and then allows for a clean and simple transfer to the bottle.

It might help the spouses and roommates of homebrew enthusiasts as well; The Catalyst is designed to be smaller, cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than most brewing equipment. The Craft a Brew team has actually been researching, testing and prototyping the idea for almost 2 years and has promised to ship The Catalyst to backers by October. The company is still taking pre-orders for the time being on their Kickstarter page.

June 20, 2016

Smart Kitchen Notes: Juicero In Restaurant Biz, Keurig Gets Kold Feet

In This Edition…

The early success of Juicero in the pro market
Keurig kills the Kold
America’s Test Kitchen launching new food science site
PicoBrew ships the first Pico
Alchema connected cider maker brewing over at Hax
A podcast interview with Hestan Cue chief scientist Darren Vengroff about the furture of cooking

It seems like foodtech and the connected kitchen are gaining momentum, and nowhere is that more evident than in NYC in the first half of June. Not only will the Innit debut at Pirch SoHo next week (we’ll see you there!), the Big Apple is home to the Food Loves Tech event this week.

Around the rest of the country we also saw some interesting developments in kitchen and food tech, including the news that Keurig Green Mountain will kill the Keurig Kold, growing interest in the intersection between cooking and science from America’s Test Kitchen and, here in the NorthWest, PicoBrew just shipped their first Pico unit to a super backer (who wrote a review!).

That and we investigate how Juicero is making significant headway in the restaurant and business market, a new connected cider maker that’s incubating over at Hax, and we also tell you a little about our venue for Smart Kitchen Summit 2016.

Speaking of SKS16, you have just a little while longer for early bird ticket prices, so you might want to hurry on over and get your ticket today.

And oh yeah, we have a great podcast interview with Hestan Cue’s chief scientist, Darren Vengroff! We talk about the early days of the sous vide movement and the emergence of guided cooking. Make sure to check it out (and subscribe!).

The Juicero, A $700 Home Juicer, Already Finding A Home In The Pro Market

Like many, I initially got sticker shock when I saw the price of the Juicero, a pod-based connected cold-pressed juicing machine. At $700, the device is a bit spendy for all but the most dedicated juicers or those with lots of discretionary income.

The Juicero

Which is why I had lots of questions when I sat down with the company’s CEO, Doug Evans, when he visited Seattle this spring to discuss the home juicer. A natural salesmen, he didn’t blink at the question and insisted he’d easily find a market for the product. I suspected he could be right, particularly since there was likely a market among upper-income home juicers who are tired of the mess and work it requires to get to athe single glass of juice. In many ways, home juicing is in the same primitive stage of expense and mess that the homebrew space has been in the last few decades prior to the arrival of new home brewing systems such as PicoBrew and Brewie. Read More

Podcast: The future of cooking with Darren Vengroff

This episode of the Smart Kitchen Show features the Chief Scientist for Hestan Cue, the division of cookware giant Meyer creating a next-generation smart cooking product called the Hestan Cue.

Darren was there in the early stages of sous vide, helping to run eGullet when Nathan Myhrvold and others started frequenting the site and forming a community that would provide the foundation of what would eventually become the modern sous vide market.

Darren and Mike discuss the early days of sous vide, the evolution of precision cooking, the emergence of a new appliance category called guided cooking systems and much more. If you’re interested in the future of cooking, this is a good episode to check out.

Keurig Kills The Kold

This week we learned that Keurig Green Mountain was discontinuing the Keurig Kold home soda machine. The company would be laying off 130 workers, mostly from the pod production side of the business.

Our Take: Like the more popular Keurig coffee machines – now, somewhat awkwardly, called Keurig Hot – the Keurig Kold used a pod-based system, only instead of coffee they made soft drinks. The problem with this idea is that unlike coffee, consumers haven’t been trained to pay high prices for homemade soda, particularly home soda that doesn’t taste as good as the pre-bottled stuff from Big Soda.

My feeling was the Keurig Kold would have done better if it positioned itself as a home pod-based cocktail machine, partly because consumers are used to paying more for cocktails, and most consumers don’t really know how to mix cocktails themselves all that well. Whether or nor the company takes another swing at cold drinks is unclear but, if they do, they might want to make the Keurig Kold the home bartender instead of the home soda fountain.

America’s Test Kitchen Wants to Bring Science to Cooking

Launched over two decades ago, America’s Test Kitchen has become the go-to resource for kitchen cooking instruction for home chefs. Now the group is looking to help take cooking to the next level, and bring new cooks into the mix, with the launch of the Cook’s Science website. The group recently announced its launch, led by executive editors Molly Birnbaum and Dan Souza and aim to add an element of narrative in order to tell stories about the intersection of science and food.

Our Take: This initiative to look at science and technology and examine how they are changing how we cook is part of a growing trend. With the emergence of Guiding Cooking Systems, meal delivery services, app-based cooking gadgets and hands-off appliance functionality, we continue to see efforts to reinvent the core concepts in cooking and appeal to the next generation of cooks in the kitchen. There is a gap in concentrated reporting around this and other related subjects, including food technology, smart kitchen, the convergence of science and tech with food and more. We hope this and other similar efforts will help tell interesting stories and spark a movement that drives the kitchen of the future.

PicoBrew Ships First Pico Unit To Superbacker

PicoBrew recently shipped its Pico unit off of the production line to one of its most ardent backers, Luke Murphy. Murphy, a long-time homebrewer based in North Bend, Washington, backed the first PicoBrew product in the Zymatic, and in a recent blog post discussed his experience with his first brew with the Pico.

From the post:

Set up was a breeze. Really fast and easy. Plug in, turn on, find and log into Wi-Fi, and then register the device on your PicoBrew account. That’s it.

As for brew day, it’s just about as simple. 1) Fill up the water reservoir and the keg to the defined water level 2) Hook the keg up to the device 3)You pull out the step filter, load in the grain box and hop box, and load the step filter back in. 4) The Pico automatically recognizes the Pico Pack and loads the recipe into the machine. 5) Hit go (after giving a prompt if you want more or less hoppy and more or less ABV). This took less than two minutes.

Clean up was pretty spectacularly easy too. 1) unhook the keg 2) pull out the step filter and dump the grain and hop box into the compost 3) rinse the step filter, this is really easy as there is no residue from grain or hops 4) attached the ball lock adaptors to the line in and line out ball locks 5) have a pitcher of clean water to draw from and an empty pitcher to deposit to. The clean cycle took all of 3 minutes.

All in all, from start to finish, 2 hours and 20 minutes, only 5 minutes that needed a human.

Our Take: We think the Pico is probably one generation away from being a true mass market “Keurig for Beer”, the second generation brewer from PicoBrew will certainly be important in opening up the market beyond hard-core home brewers to casual early adopters and beer enthusiasts. While Murphy is definitely a super-early adopter, his post describes an important ease-of-use around the experience we think will be important as this market expands.

Alchema Home Cider Machine Brewing at Hax Accelerator

The Hax hardware accelerator is an interesting incubator for a variety of hardware startups, but one in particular recently caught our eye. TheAlchema home cider maker is just another example of a growing trend we’re seeing around connected drink makers, including the FirstBuild cold brew coffee maker and the Chime home chai maker. Whether or not the addressable market is big enough for all of these devices is yet to be seen, but we’re encouraged to see innovation around home beverages. The Alchema is hitting Kickstarter in July.

If you haven’t subscribed to our newsletter, do so today to make sure you don’t miss out on getting this analysis in your inbox every week. And while you’re at it, make sure you get your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit soon to make sure you don’t miss your opportunity to meet the leaders of the connected kitchen revolution in October.