When you kick back at the end of a hot summer day with a cold beer in hand, you could be sipping a cold brew from a unique IoT project.
Monterail, a Wroclaw, Poland-based web and mobile development agency focusing on IoT, recently designed Breweree, an IoT beer-brewing system, that automatically tracks cooling temperatures during the beer fermentation process. As Monterail has iterated on the design of Breweree – the sensors and the software – the most recent version is focused on temperature monitoring and control that can be used for fermentation, mashing or boiling.
The sensor is waterproof and handles temperatures from -55 to 125 degrees Celsius. And, if you want the sensor data to automate the cooling process, you can install an automatic cooler control unit that will adjust the temperature based on data and the temperatures needed for the beer flavor profile you’re brewing.
“I happen to be both a home brewer and an IoT enthusiast – building some prototypes at night, when nobody sees. At some point, I came up with an idea that joining those two passions may bring mutual benefits for our entire team – enabling us to discover more possibilities in IoT applications as well as making our own beer brand tastier,” said said Grzegorz Hajdukiewicz, IoT Team Leader at Monterail. “Now, once the app is ready and we have delivered the first version of working hardware designed by our R&D, we keep improving it with new features. Not only software-wise. We’re testing and developing different approaches for sensing physical values such as temperature, density or carbonation level.”
In Monterail’s initial design, the temperature sensor transmitted temperature data to the cloud via IoT. However, as Monterail continued to hone its beer-brewing IoT system, the agency used its knowledge of mobile development to build a mobile app to track the beer brewing process.
Monterail hasn’t yet released Breweree for purchase.
“At this point, we’re testing Breweree internally on our own crafted beer – MonterAle. We keep trying to improve its every feature step by step and get to the desired point of brewing being fully interactive,” Hajdukiewicz said.
Food and beverage manufacturers are among the industries looking to utilize IoT technology for efficiency gains. McKinsey & Co., in their report An Executive’s Guide To the Internet of Things, estimated a nearly $5 trillion in economic value could be generated annually via IoT technology in B2B settings – factories, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, construction and offices.
“BI Intelligence projects the IoT device installed base to reach 24 billion in 2020, up from 4.2 billion at the end of 2015,” said John Greenough, Senior Research Analyst for BI Intelligence at Business Insider. “Many large food and beverage companies are already integrating the IoT throughout the entirety of their workflow.”
Domino’s, the world’s largest pizza chain, allows franchisees to order equipment and supplies online via cloud-based platform built by Capgemini. In the future, that ordering process could be shifted to automated replenishment via an IoT infrastructure.
Monterail’s focus on IoT projects beyond a typical web and mobile development agency is driven by market demand according to Hajdukiewicz.
“The IoT market is escalating quickly. We’re already building and maintaining a few IoT-related projects and designing some early-phase prototypes,” Hajdukiewicz said. “Companies are passionate about the interaction between physical and digital world for a good reason. There are many unrevealed possibilities ahead, which may be enabled by those new technologies. Just like the internet did in the 1990s.”