Beer Brewing Bender Completed 113
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!"
Cache (Score:5, Informative)
Coral here! [nyud.net]
Re:Cartoon Props? (Score:3, Informative)
cool bot, poor beer (Score:4, Informative)
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.
mnb Re:That's so cool! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:That's so cool! (Score:3, Informative)
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... (Score:3, Informative)
While his server hasn't become a smoking ruin, check out his TARDIS MAME console [asciimation.co.nz].
Re:6502? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:OMG Bender has a TARDIS (Score:3, Informative)
I am such a nerd.
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? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:cool bot, poor beer (Score:2, Informative)
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 [howtobrew.com], as well as Denny Conn's batch sparging instructions [hbd.org], Basic Brewing Radio [basicbrewing.com], and The Jamil Show [thebrewingnetwork.com]. There are also [northernbrewer.com] various [moreflavor.com] forums [realbeer.com] 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...