It's hard to believe that we've circled the sun twice since the last time I posted to this site, but the calendar doesn't lie. I suppose that having a child, changing jobs, and living through the coattails of a pandemic will have that effect. At any rate, there are some new additions to the brew house which will put some goals of mine a little closer to reality. The thoughts of including more tech in my brewery have been swirling my mind for years, but I had never come across a home brewer platform that would allow me to implement anything into the hot-side of the brewery. The cold-side of the brewery has been running on tilt and fermentrack for years, but aside from building a 3 vessel E-Herms...nothing I had come across would allow for more precision/automation. Enter...BruControl. Towards the middle of 2022 I came across several threads on HomeBrewTalk that showed off some very impressive "home breweries" that seemed to be running off of software...from mash-in to cold-crashing. After several weeks of lurking on the "Brewery control & automation software" forum, I figured out that the breweries I had come to admire were running on BruControl. This application was a proprietary software stack created by Peter Bruno. I also found that he (and I assume a small team) built and sold an all-in-one solution that would allow a brewer to connect the requisite valves, sensors, meters, etc required to automate hot-side brewing to the software. Having relatively recently embarked on the E-herms controller build...I was less apt to building my own interface to control all of the input/outputs so I dropped an order with BruControl for their "Uniflex" (hardware/software interface) and a couple dozen motorized valves. Having been in contact with Peter only days earlier describing what I was looking to achieve in my brewery, I assumed that the order would land on my front porch in the next 4-6 weeks. Let's just say, I slightly underestimated the timeline... The short version of this story is that it took 10 months to receive my Uniflex. I'm not going to throw shade towards Peter because he did provide updates periodically, he sent me a demo unit, and even upgraded my Uniflex with some additional input/output ports...but the whole process was definitely frustrating. With that said...on to the automation. The Uniflex (silver box in photo below) will control the pumps, heating elements, and temperature sensors in the brewery. I am building the control box that will receive signals from the 18 two-way valves, 2 proportional valves, and the volume sensor...which will then pass the data to the UniFlex via WiFi...ultimately allowing for full control of the brewery (hot-side). I've only just tonight laid out the control box and fastened components in place for a photo. I may need to move things around or reconfigure after I get a better handle on the wiring schematic.
But for now, I'm pleased to say that the Weiss Brewery is on the path to crafting fine beers with precision, consistency, and automation.
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Jamie WeissHomebrewer, Recognized BJCP Judge, aspiring Certified Cicerone Archives
November 2023
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