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Unleash Your Picobrew BrewHouse Data

Trevor Mack

Oct 19, 2020 • 5 min read

If you weren't aware already Picobrew has been in receivership and just finished under "new" owners (well really an investor group of which the founders of Picobrew are members of?!?).

Picobrew enters Receivership in February 2020

PB (Picobrew) Funding Group acquires Picobrew Assets and quickly auctions to liquidate access while talking with potential buyers for various Picobrew business verticals. (my idea of verticals: PicoPak and hobby market, Still and Spirits, Profession, Coffee and other beverages)

“I’m trying to keep the PicoBrew website live so machines can continue to operate,’’ Whitten said, adding that machines built before the Pico Model C from 2017 “do require the website for a certain amount of what they do.… There’s some intrinsic value to keeping it alive for previous customers. They’re not customers of PB Funding Group, but we’ll try to keep the system alive.’’ -- Whitten (Head Manager of PB Funding Group) interviewed by Seattle Times.

Given that the new owner have been interviewed by The Seattle Times and has been quoted in saying that "Picobrew customers aren't customers of PB Funding Group" which is strange given that Picobrew is now owned by PB Funding Group and PB Funding Group was founded in order to provide angel investment dollars to Picobrew... while the PB in PB Funding Group even stands for "Picobrew". Like classic Picobrew style communications from top are massively confusing and frustrating to us the end users. For all these reasons I felt it was time to extract all my data from the Picobrew servers and setup a script so that anyone else can do the same.

$ npm install -g picobrew-cli
$ picobrew (-v|--version|version)
picobrew-cli/0.1.0 darwin-x64 node-v12.6.0
$ picobrew --help [COMMAND]
Command line interface used to communicate to Picobrew

VERSION
  picobrew-cli/0.1.0 darwin-x64 node-v12.6.0

USAGE
  $ picobrew [COMMAND]

COMMANDS
  help      display help for picobrew
  recipes   Command used to export different formats of beer recipes from the Picobrew Brewhouse.
  sessions  Command used to export sessions from linked machines from the Picobrew Brewhouse.

Using both of the commands in the above nodejs CLI tool you can extract all your brew session data that you have come to love about the PicoBrew BrewHouse (live brew session seen below).

These are simply CSV files exported from the PicoBrew BrewHouse API. Modifications will likely need to happen with the data to visualize without PicoBrew's servers, but that can happen later down the door when PicoBrew servers go dark.

Here is a snippet of what these CSV files look like.

#ZSessionID,ID,LogDate,StepName,TargetTemp,WortTemp,ThermoBlockTemp,AmbientTemp,DrainTemp,ValvePosition,KegPumpOn,DrainPumpOn,ErrorCode,PauseReason,rssi,netSend,netWait,netRecv
63069,12003287,5/27/2020 1:53:47 PM,Pre-Brew Tests Circulation,0,17.67443081,18.06309571,21.74503042,18.65986681,2,True,True,0,1,-37,1519,2353,88
63069,12003291,5/27/2020 1:54:20 PM,Pre-Brew Tests Circulation,0,17.1801364,17.4098023,21.44874382,18.70770482,2,True,True,0,1,-38,1531,2354,88
63069,12003297,5/27/2020 1:54:52 PM,Pre-Brew Tests Circulation,0,16.98838856,17.16860512,21.16295908,18.72075143,2,True,True,0,1,-37,1550,2379,88
63069,12003302,5/27/2020 1:55:25 PM,Pre-Brew Tests Circulation,0,16.94697784,17.08190586,20.96484908,18.73379798,2,True,True,0,1,-38,1594,2380,88
63069,12003307,5/27/2020 1:55:57 PM,Pre-Brew Tests Circulation,0,16.94043877,17.04716945,20.86197323,18.7685884,2,True,True,0,1,-36,1567,2376,88
63069,12003312,5/27/2020 1:56:30 PM,Preparing To Brew,0,16.9992837,16.99492268,20.7899762,18.8729561,2,True,True,0,0,-35,1548,2380,88
63069,12003317,5/27/2020 1:57:03 PM,Preparing To Brew,0,16.97531075,17.0819569,20.70256608,18.82947046,2,True,True,0,0,-37,1567,2376,88

Alternative Server Solutions

There are a few alternative server solutions (both online self-hosted in AWS or offline and running on your network). Unfortunately all machine types as of right now require a server to communicate to. This is where recipe instructions (boil times, mash schedule, hop additions/times) are stored and referenced from there machines themselves don't hold this in their limited memory. Stay tuned for a future blog post about specifics on setting this up and using the various feature of each.

To keep things short for today I'll just list out the initiatives I know about below.

Chief Wigms Server (recommended use with local RaspberryPI)

Complete with support for C/S/Pro, Zymatic, ZSeries, PicoFerm and PicoStill.

PlanBeer (recommended use with AWS + Windows Computer)

Currently limited to supporting ZSeries.