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Part of realizing that vision is making the process as straightforward as possible — automating pumps and temperature control, but also tracking all the variables of different recipes for more consistent brews.

“You load the grains, and the hops in hoppers. You open the valve and let it go. And when the brew is done, an alarm goes off, and you pump it into something,” Mr. Vlodarchyk imagines.

Such a device does exist, but you can’t go get one, yet. In late September, a design and development studio called Cargo from Belfast, Northern Ireland announced a product called the BrewBot on Kickstarter. It’s very much the culmination of the sort of processes that Strathmore and Broadhead are using, with Arduino-based automation controlled via iPhone app — but gussied up with the polished wood and metal of a commercial, consumer machine.

BrewBot’s creators want to make the process of brewing a 20-litre batch of beer about as easy as putting on a pot of coffee, giving the average home brewer everything he or she needs to make great tasting craft brews.

But Strathmore co-founder Mr. Camisso points out there’s only so far microcomputers can get you in reaching your vision.

“You can’t automate taste. You can’t automate barley. You can try, but it’s organics.” he said. It’s part of the reason why even BrewBot — for the moment — still requires its operator to manually add grains and hops at specified times.

Rather than attempt to chase the holy grail of total automation, brewers such as Mr. Camisso are instead looking for better ways to make use of the data the sensors on their digital brewing rigs produce. Strathmore logs all of its temperature data to a computer for review, for example, while Broadhead goes a step further with recipes that are digitally stored. In both cases, the goal is the same — to brew consistent tasting, commercially viable beer, at a fraction of the cost.

“We were actually quite surprised at our home-brew beginnings, how consistent we got with it. And of course, we attributed it to monitoring and controlling those temperatures down to that small degree,” said Mr. Larocque, who literally transplanted his Arduino-based system from their old basement setup into Broadhead’s current industrial space.

“When we went commercial, we had that confidence to know we were able to be consistent — which, of course, when you get to that scale, is even more important.”