I used a traditional glass pH meter for the first two years of brewing and thought I was doing fine until I borrowed a digital electrode-based meter from a fellow brewer and discovered my readings had been drifting by 0.3–0.
My Arduino brewing controller started as a weekend project to automate temperature control for a single RIMS tube and ended up as a full brew day controller managing three temperature zones, two pumps, and an automated hop addition alert system.
I brewed for three years without keeping proper records, and I regret it. When a batch turned out exceptionally well, I couldn’t reliably reproduce it because I didn’t know whether the improvement came from the grain adjustment, the different yeast …
Inline sensors for pH and gravity monitoring represent the frontier of homebrew automation — the kind of measurement that commercial breweries have had for decades but that has only become affordable for homebrewers in the past few years.
Data-driven brewing changed how I think about recipe development. Before I started keeping consistent numerical records, my process improvement was intuitive — “that batch was better, I think it was the hops” — and I was making the same mistakes …
Automating the mash process was the single upgrade that changed brew day from a 6-hour attention-intensive effort into something I could manage alongside other work.
Moving my recipe library to the cloud was one of those infrastructure decisions that seems trivial until you’ve lost a hard drive with two years of recipes on it.
AI in brewing has moved from speculative to practical faster than most homebrewers have noticed. When I ran my first recipe through an AI recipe generator in 2023 as a curiosity, the output was formulaic and unremarkable.
Smart hydrometers generate more debate in homebrewing communities than almost any other piece of equipment — half the brewers I talk to swear by them, the other half think they’re expensive toys for people who can’t be bothered to take …
I added a Tilt wireless hydrometer to my fermentation setup two years ago and it changed how I think about fermentation management.