Beer Brewing Bender Completed

An anonymous reader writes "The Beer Brewing Bender Project is finally completed. This is a fan built, full sized Bender from Futurama featuring a 6502 CPU powered brain to make him speak triggered by a prop remote control straight out of the show. Inside his body is a beer fermenter used to brew up a batch of real Benderbrau beer!"

Comments

Cache

[dr_d_19]

...before it gets 'dotted.

Coral here!

Re:Cartoon Props?

[Tony Hoyle]

The remote is a faithful rendition of a remote used in the show - looks very authentic. I'm not sure prop is the right term but I'm having a hard time right now thinking of a better one.

cool bot, poor beer

[darqit]

I used to brew some beer myself and the home kit the guy is using makes for pisspoor beer. And also beer from plastic bottles!!! blasphemy

You want to be using real ingredients not the beersyrup this guy uses. Real barley and hops. Most small breweries also sell to individuals.

Heat the barley in a pan with sufficient water (as in how much beer you want) and look up a schematic for the heating. Essentially this means heating your mixture to a designated temperature and keeping it there for a period of time. Different temperatures make the barley release different sugars. there are different temperature schemes. Experiment with a few you can really see the difference.

Add half your hops at the beginning and the other half halfway trough the heating process

Then strain your beer a few times until it has the desired clarity (can be influenced by the type of barley)and cool the mixture down so the yeast survives when you add it. It is good practice to activate your yeast before adding

The beerbender does use a handy fermenting vat. These are actually quite cheap. Keep the beer for at least 1 week at around 24 degrees celsius

The botteling is next. If you like beer you surely have some glass beer bottles. Buy a bottlecapper and some caps. Again really cheap.

You can use sugar drops to get the CO2 in the bottle but about 2-4 grams of plain sugar also works. I like using some honey as it can be tasted later.But an absolute winner is the brown caster sugar

cap the bottles with the sugar and again wait for minimally 2 weeks at 24 degrees before consuming

this way you can vary your beer way more than using some kit. You can experiment with different barley,hops,heating schemes,yeasts,storing times,straining and sugars.

Re:cool bot, poor beer

[5c11]

I know quite a few people already responded to your beer methodology, but the beer nerd in me can't help but put in a few words along with them.

First of all, you're absolutely right that his beer is probably gonna taste like crap (or "sparkling pond water" as John Palmer puts it). That said, there's nothing wrong with using extract, or "beersyrup" as you call it (though admittedly the pre-hopped stuff is worthy of derision). A lot of award-winning beers have been made from extracts with steeping grains. Most people start out doing a few extract beers, then move on to all-grain. Some people never move on to all-grain because they're happy with the beer they get from extract and don't want to go through the extra work that all-grain takes. On the other hand, all-grain is cheaper and gives you a lot more variables to tweak to control how your beer will turn out. It really just amounts to how cheap you are and how much time you want to spend.

As far as your methodology... either you're not articulating it well, or you don't really have the method down (at least not the method most people tend to use). Straining for clarity? What? Are you actually boiling the wort or not? I'm not going to lay out the precise steps that need to be followed as some people seem to be trying to do, but I will add on another recommendation for John Palmer's How to Brew, as well as Denny Conn's batch sparging instructions, Basic Brewing Radio, and The Jamil Show. There are also various forums that can be incredibly helpful as well.

Back on topic... the Bender statue is pretty much awesome, even if all it looks like all it really does beer-wise is hold a 5 gallon plastic bucket. Now, a temperature controlled stainless steel conical fermenter Bender, that would really be something...

mnb Re:That's so cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch it, hops can get way out of hand really quickly. They can take over a yard in short order.

Re:That's so cool!

[ralph75les]

"I just told all my friends to start drinking Corona, or MGD (pry off) or even Grolsch with the flip top."

Uh, you're going to be bottling in CLEAR bottles??? As as experienced beer brewer, I recommend that you DON'T use clear. The best bottles to use will be brown, followed by green (which I never use). I'm sure you've heard it before, but light is the enemy of beer. It'll skunk it quickly. The Grolsch bottles are okay, but sometimes those rubber seals will fail, and then when you bottle-condition the beer, it won't carbonate. Just some helpful advice, enjoy your brewing.

An old /. favourite...

[Chris Brewer]

Don't forget, this is the guy that created the jet-powered beer cooler as discussed way back when.

While his server hasn't become a smoking ruin, check out his TARDIS MAME console.

Re:6502?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The Terminator T-800 also runs on a 6502.

Re:OMG Bender has a TARDIS

[Tetsujin]

The real question is did you have to look it up?

I am such a nerd. Yeah, I didn't take the time to memorize the code when I was watching the DVD, or pay too much attention to exactly what the digit sequence was. But for posting here, of course, I wanted to get it right. :D

But I did learn that there's a very simple way to remember it... it's a count from 1 to 6 with a mirror-imaged copy... Funny how the secrets to the universe have such a simple basis.

Re:6502?

[onemorechip]

In the episode where Fry tried to use the professor's F-Ray to find the winning Slurm bottle cap, at one point the F-Ray was pointed at Bender's head and revealed a 6502 (just watched this episode again the other day, thanks to Cartoon Network's recent marathon). So Beer Brewing Bender's designers knew what they were doing.