What if you could easily make any craft brew?
It seems too easy. While most homebrewers toil five or more hours to boil, lauter and chill their beer on a typical brew day, the PicoBrew promises to complete the project in 2 to 3 hours — with extremely minimal effort on the user’s part. The process, as advertised, essentially boils down to inserting a prepackaged malts and hops PicoPak into the machine, pressing the start button and, shortly thereafter, enjoying the brew.
Using the PicoBrew is, of course, not nearly that simple, but on its principal promise it does deliver: The machine does make drinkable beer.
The PicoBrew isn’t the only automated homebrew device on the market, nor is its science very new — the company was established in 2010 by brothers Bill and Jim Mitchell — but with craft beer sales on the rise, the company is catching the “wonderful wave of the craft beer revolution,” said Donald Brewer, the company’s sales vice president.
PicoBrew’s impacts are twofold: On the homebrew front, the machine neutralizes risks of human error, but it also appeases hobbyists’ DIY interests in making their own beer.
“Along with the enthusiasm for craft beer, there is a growing interest in the beer itself and the brewing process,” Brewer said. “We call them ‘brew-curious’ people, and a lot of them are in the Millennial age group that has an interest in DIY, make-it-myself and use fresh ingredients.”
On the larger craft beer front, the company could have big ramifications. If homebrewers can replicate famous brewers’ recipes, it nearly eliminates the boundaries of terroir; any beer could conceivably be brewed anywhere in the world where there is a machine and access to clean water — regardless of where the brewery that invented the recipe operates.
PicoBrew’s ability to lure people to homebrewing — for better or for worse — was enough to win over Shaun O’Sullivan, self-fashioned “homebrew geek” and cofounder of 21st Amendment Brewery, with taprooms in San Leandro and San Francisco.
21st Amendment, along with 170 other mostly craft breweries, has licensed a beer recipe to PicoBrew, enabling the company to sell the basic malts and hops required to make their beer. That means that even those in states or countries that don’t get 21st Amendment beer on store shelves can order raw materials from PicoBrew’s website and, ignoring the specific characteristics of Bay Area water chemistry, make 21st Amendment’s popular Brew Free or Die IPA anywhere in the world.
In fact, with enough practice, a person could hypothetically replicate a number of popular beers wherever they are in a much easier and more efficient way than traditional homebrewing.
“When I got started in craft beer I would clone recipes. That’s what got me turned on to craft beer,” O’Sullivan said. “For us at 21st Amendment, it’s an opportunity to showcase the beer we have in the marketplace in cans and draft and allow people to have fun with it at home.”
The choice to work with PicoBrew was not a snap decision, however. It took over a year of discussions, tastingbeer samples brewed on a Pico system and recipe modifications to get to a place where O’Sullivan and co-founder Nico Freccia were content.
“I was concerned with if they were going to be able to match the flavor,” he said. “We sent them our recipe and they worked it up for their system and they sent us samples probably three or four times. There were definitely tweaks back and forth until we were satisfied with it.”
As the user base for the product grows, PicoBrew’s new online community will allow those with the higherend PicoBrew models to publish their own recipes. If those recipes become big sellers on the site, the homebrewers could take home a decent royalties check.
“It’s an opportunity to showcase the beer we have in the marketplace in cans and draft and allow people to have fun with it at home.” Shaun O’Sullivan, 21st Amendment co-founder
The PicoBrew process works, in part, because it minimizes and even eliminates unpredictable variables that have the potential to ruin a homebrewer’s batch. The process is an extremely controlled one; once you get everything set up and press the start button, Brewer said, “you can walk away and go shopping and come back and your beer is brewed.”
To help taste-test a Chronicle batch of PicoBrew’s flagship pilsner, the Pico Pils, we turned to Chris Cohen, founder of the San Francisco Homebrewers Guild and owner of Bernal Heights craft beer bar Old Devil Moon.
“It is pretty crisp on finish, surprisingly,” he said. “Carbonation is not bad.” There were some off-flavors, though. “It is pretty green,” Cohen said, suggesting the instructions didn’t give the beer enough time to properly ferment. He said the beer “modestly exceeded” his expectations but added that it would have been better if it called for a longer fermentation.
“I think it would do really well with a few weeks of lagering,” he said. “This has more sulfur. I don’t know if you’d be able to get those esters and phenols to dissipate much but you would to some extent. If you put it in your fridge for a couple weeks it would probably be a lot better.”
One thing that might hold back homebrewers is the PicoBrew price. With a consumer model called the PicoBrew Pro priced at $799, and a more luxe version at $1,999, many might find the homebrew appliance financially out of reach. However, Brewer said that with a successful Kickstarter campaign and a minority stake investment from ZX Ventures, the experimental project arm of AnheuserBusch InBev, PicoBrew will release a version for restaurants as well as a less expensive consumer model, the PicoBrew C, for $549.