Make Home Sweet Home Even Sweeter
Anyone can create beer and wine. In fact, individuals have been brewing beer for at least 7,000 years and making wine for much longer.
From the ancient world, beer and wine were daily beverages for aristocrats and crucial elements of religious ceremonies. Prior to the industrial revolution, the two were routinely made in European homes and monasteries.
Centuries and millennia past, the process of fermenting grapes and grain was performed without any of those things considered necessary today — without isolated yeast, sterilization, thermometers as well as the knowledge that yeast and other fermenting microorganisms existed.
All that was required was lots of patience, training, wisdom and luck.
Since industrialization, it has become possible to completely control every facet of production, often using computer controls along with many different sensors that tell the beer- or wine-makers about fever, acidity, sugar levels and other valuable information.
Consequently, our criteria for beer and wine safety, purity, quality and variety have gone way up.
An undercover enthusiast community of home-brew fans and, in recent years, home wine-making nerds, has sprung up. Their methods have a tendency to lie somewhere between the computer-controlled, high-tech methods of the major industrial producers as well as the European monks who relied on their hard-won skill, magic mixing spoons and tons of prayer.
In the past several years, a tiny new category of products has surfaced which lets you conduct an extremely high tech brewery or winery into your home.
WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery – $4,456
The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery is the most high tech, industrial-quality home brewery you can buy. It includes step-by-step directions, which need simple sterilization, pouring water, malt focus, yeast and other components to a huge tank, then setting a few dials. At the conclusion of a week, cold beer comes out of the built-in tap. It makes six gallons of beer per batch.
It is all very simple, but the WilliamsWarn system does lots of hard work. The system is computer-controlled, but the home brewer just deals with the simple dials and knobs on the surface.
To make a certain sort of beer, you buy a particular ingredient kit out of WilliamsWarn, also it includes the components and directions. You could also customize with special hops or yeasts from the organization’s online catalog.
For starters, single-tank brewing requires the injection of a warning agent under stress from CO2, which compels the sediment into a small tank at the bottom of the main tank.
After you remove the sediment tank, cooling and stress methods keep the beer cold and bubbly for the duration.
Synergy Brew – $1,995
To get a less high tech, less suitable, less expensive but still fairly industrial alternative, try the Synergy Brewing Systems home brewery.
The Synergy Brew is a 15-gallon, three-tank, two-tier system with two 155,000 BTU propane burners, a mash tun with a false bottom, a brew kettle along with a hot liquor tank. It is really no different from a well-provisioned home-brew platform like home brewers are putting together for a long time. The distinction is that Synergy provides nearly everything you need in a single, racked system.
The crucial benefit of Synergy is that you could extract beer from grain, rather than from pre-made malt syrup extracts.
WinePod – $4,499
The WinePod is billed as the world’s first personal winery, the first automatic teaching winery and the most advanced winemaking system on earth.
The organization started to great fanfare in 2007 and shut down as soon as the recession hit a year after. But on July 17, the business announced its return with a new, enhanced product.
The WinePod includes teaching software known as the WineCoach, which gives step-by-step directions to the winemaker. Some of the lessons are triggered by the WinePod’s brix sensor. (Brix is a measure of the glucose content in wine.)
You begin with blossoms — the WinePod crushes them appropriately for the kind of wine being made, manages the temperature and tracks the glucose content during the procedure.
The goods’ manufacturers say you are able to keep the WinePod in your kitchen, if you would like to.
If you have ever thought about expressing your enthusiasm for beer or wine by making it yourself but have been put off by the complexity or messiness — it’s time to reconsider. These new products make running your home brewery or winery easier, cleaner and much more elegant.
Can you brew? We’d love to understand your setup from the Comments below.
