I recently purchased several
PicoBrew Zymatic systems for the
Regis Applied Craft Brewing Certificate program. These are fully automated hot-side brewing systems for homebrewing. The systems have a lot of awesome features, you can manage the mashing cycle from your phone, have it run while you are gone, and have precise temperature control.
I decided to take one of them for a test drive and see how it performed.
The system shipped in three boxes and is rather heavy, I was hoping that it would be a little more mobile than it is. If you were pulling it into and out of storage a lot it would be a bit of a pain. The boxes included a keg, the outside system, and the insert for the system full of all the miscellaneous pieces. I was pretty excited to see that it also came with a recipe kit so that you could start brewing as soon as you opened the box.
The system was very easy to get set up and had you start by running a simple cleaning cycle. A few more pictures would have been nice in the user guide, but is was pretty simple to figure out how everything went together.
After the cleaning cycle had ended I loaded up the insert with the grain and the hops that came in the kit. This was all very straightforward but made one draw back very clear. You are limited to brewing 2.5 gallons of beer in a time. Not a huge issue for me as I usually brew smaller batches anyways. However, for $2,000 being limited to 2.5 gallons at a time is kind of a downer.
I set the system up, made my water additions in the keg, and fired everything up. Since the system is fully automated I decided I should be fine to go and paint the outside of my house. I came back in after about an hour and noticed that there was a slow drip in the system somewhere. I tried pushing the insert farther back but that did not make a difference. I ended up with a bucket under the system as it slowly dripped the rest of the brew.
It was very cool to be able to pull up the system while I was painting outside and see the progress. There is a chart that is slowly constructed as the brew occurs that highlights when you move to boiling and hop additions are made.
After the boil finished the beer has to be cooled down. Here was another let down of the system. Even after paying $2,000 you have to figure out how to cool the wort. There is no heat-exchanger included. I ended up sticking the keg (that now contained all the wort) into a bucket of ice to cool down. In the future I am going to try to hook up a heat-exchanger inline so that I can avoid this issue.
After the beer cooled down, I added the yeast and placed the keg into my fridge with a temp controller set at 65F. In a week or so I should be able to transfer it and bottle it up.
I later went and played with the online recipe creator. It is cool for someone who always follows the rules. However, for an advanced brewer there are a lot of limitations. For one, you can only pick from a limited catalog of yeast to add to the beer, and it forces you to pick from one on the list instead of being able to add your own. This was particularly frustrating for me who likes to play around with yeast! There were also only 4 water addition options and you had to use teaspoons as the value, so anyone who wants to use grams is out of luck.
Overall it is a cool piece of equipment. I am looking forward to the precise temperature control and hopping additions that I will be able to set. I also really like that you can run a rinse and a cleaning procedure on the equipment. The 2.5 gallon limitation will likely be a downer for some people, but it does not really matter all that much to me. What I would like to see changed is the online recipe builder. It needs to include more options for building out your recipe.
