Build Your Own BSD Beer Brewing Control System

gnuguru writes "Here's a great use for some of your old hardware, a BSD beer brewing kit! Components: one 486, FreeBSD, a temperature logger kit, a relay board, some odds and ends from the useful box, and some time. Summer's just around the corner, so get to work gang!" You'll have to use this recipe, naturally.

Comments

BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD: The Beer Service Device.

Accessories?

[Eziril]

Now to put some in my Peltier Beer cooler http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~arnesen/peltierbeer/

Summer?

[BladeMelbourne]

Summer's just around the corner, so get to work gang!

Being the 15th of January, it is exactly half way through Melbourne's 3 month summer season now. You self centered US folk :p

Free, as in?

[Ghostgate]

This brings new meaning to the phrase: "Free(BSD) as in beer."

Let me see if I've got this straight....

[trs9000]

So, now, I can make beer that's free as in speech? I'm confused.

Great for work

[nizo]

The fun part is explaining to your boss why you need a fridge for the new computer "disk pack".

Open Source Beer?

[kingjosh]

As with any open source project . . . we'll need a lot of testing. Any volunteers?

Toldja FreeBSD wasn't dead!!!...

[cepler]

See, FreeBSD isn't dead! Just drunk!

A simple thermostat isn't good enough...

[ZombieEngineer]

The purpose from the article was to provide a temperature profile. Biological processes are a tad bit complicated with the desired product sometimes will only be produced under certain circumstances, from memory Penicilin is only formed by a certain fungus during the "death stage" of fermentation at a specific temperature. eg: all the culture is used up and the biomas starts to consume itself)

By controlling the temperature profile during fermentation it is possible to radically change the "taste" of the product. That is why the Australian / South African wine growers can churn out a reasonably good product cheaply (as opposed to the French) as they use large temperature controlled stainless steel vats with scorched oak chips rather than small wooden casks.

Zombie Engineer

Re:A simple thermostat isn't good enough...

[medoc]

For your information, in France as elsewhere, the fermentation phase of wine brewing is done in large containers (inox or wood or cement vats).

The wine is only transferred to casks when the fermentation is done.

The period while the wine stays in casks is called elevage (can't remember the english term), and aims at refining the wine taste before bottling (this can last up to a few years). Not all wines go through a cask elevage.

There are a few cases of fermentation in casks, but they are truely the exception.

Tooting my own horn

[Brandybuck]

Speaking of FreeBSD and brewing, check out QBrew. Open Source brewing software for FreeBSD (or Linux, Unix, OSX, Windows, etc). It's developed on FreeBSD, and as far as I know it's the only (stable and released) native brewing software for Linux, BSD, Unix and OSX. Get it at http://www.usermode.org/code.html and start Open Source brewing today!

p.s. That last link of the story blurb goes to some folks who claim to have brewed the world's first Open Source beer. Balderdash! They're greenhorn newbies when it comes to Open Source beers and ales! My brewing software and recipes have been Open Source for years prior to their arrival. Heck, they even predate the license they use! So get the Original(tm) Open Source Beer and get QBrew!

p.p.s. Okay, I'm done blowing my own horn now. I won't do this again until the next beer/brewing story appears on Slashdot...