Cody and I have been working on our Computer Engineering senior project for the past couple of weeks and have made some fairly decent progress. Called the Homebrewer’s Assistance and Monitoring System (HAMS), our system will monitor and control brew temps, automatically pump beer between vessels, and signal the brewer when hops need to be added. The recipe will be input by the brew master either as a URL to a hopville recipe, or manually.

This is our first post, so we will go over our progress up to this point:

After settling on an overall frame design, we set about getting the metal, fabbing the frame parts and welding everything together.

The frame is nearly complete, the lower burner plate needs to have it’s support welded in place and the steel grate for holding the propane tank needs to be put into place. The lower burner will fold up and down for storage purposes when finished. Here is what the brew frame looks like so far:

We were able to score some old kegs from a local brewery, which we have been working on converting into keggles. So far we have just cut holes in the top of the kegs to match the diameter of a glass pot lid we had lying around.

Our initial idea was to just have the system monitor temperatures, and control pumping. We would simply pump our strike water into the mash tun when we had reached our strike temp, mash in a cooler and not worry about temperature control, then pump from the mash into the HLT for boiling.

After some thought, we decided that temperature control will be better than simply monitoring. It will allow us to have better consistency across brews, give our computer more control over the brewing process, and reduce the impact of human error. Since we already have the burners, we are going to go ahead and install them anyway, since we might want to use propane to brew with the system off, or have an additional heat source for rapid boiling. In addition to the burners, we will be adding low-density electric heating elements to the keggles, which we will be controlling with a simple PID controller (we will implement the PID on an Arduino).

This week we plan on finishing up the folding burner (we need to add supports), plumb in the propane, and add couplers to our keggles.

After that, the electric heating elements will be installed in the keggles, wired for 220V, and hooked up with solid state relays.

A water proof electrical box will be added to the brew stand, which will house our Arduino, relays and water pump.

We will then be able to route thermometers, electricity, and plumbing and get moving on the tech side of things, very exciting!

The frame is currently at my Dad’s shop Wasco Frame Service, where it will remain while in construction.

-Mike