This week Peter Symons joins Homebrewing DIY! We talk about some of his tech stack and beer history! Check out his books and videos!
Books
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/prsymons
YouTube Channel – Tritun Books
Has my FermWatch project https://youtu.be/AYtplzlXTfo and Parti-Gyles using Brewfather https://youtu.be/c0Hp4wy82wo amongst other things like making Invert Sugar, etc
Facebook @bronzedbrews
Website
https://prstemp.wixsite.com/tritun-books
and of course GitHub https://github.com/Hwerow/FermWatch
https://github.com/vitotai/BrewPiLess
https://github.com/mp-se/gravitymon
https://github.com/universam1/iSpindel
Show Transcript
AI driven it will have errors.
Colter Wilson: On this week’s episode, we have Peter Simons on the show. Peter Simon is a frequent guest. We’ve had him on the show. He’s a beer author talking about beer history. But one of the cool things about what Peters got going on is he’s got some really cool projects that he’s doing working with brew pilots, the Ice Spindle and other different open source projects. So we’re just kind of talk about his brewery, some beer history. Just have a little chat this week on Home Brewing DIY. And welcome back to Home Brewing DIY, the podcast that takes on the do it YourselfSelf aspect of Home Brewing gadgets, contraptions and parts. This show covers it all. On this week’s show, we’re talking to Peter Simons. He’s a beer author and beer historian who has found some amazing open source projects and he’s been just implementing them into his brewery. So we had him on the show. We’re going to chat about those and a little bit of your history, too. Always a great conversation with Peter and excited to have him on the show. But first, I’d like to thank all of our supporters over at Patreon. Head on over to Patreon. Comhomebrewingdy and you can give it any amount your support helps the show. Uh, very excited to have all of our Patreon supporters and it’s great to be back. And after I put out the last episode a couple weeks ago, uh, we’ll be a little more consistent as I get more guests rolling into the pipeline. I’ve actually got two recordings this week, so we should be back to back. But, uh, yeah, we’ll definitely have some more consistency as I get guests rolling in and being on the podcast. And I want to thank everyone who has stuck out through our hiatus and has still supported the show. So thank you so much for all of the support that you have given Home Brewing DIY another way support shows you can head on over to Coffee.com. Homebrewingdiyou can give one time support. And of course, you can use any of our sponsor links on our website. That is Homebrewingdiy Beer, uh, working with Ryan Pakmeyer, guest on the show on our last episode, just to get some of our episodes. Not our episodes, but more of our blog post. Up and rolling again, has some really great articles specific to beer styles, woods and chinos box, all kinds of stuff. So we’re going to start working on getting all that stuff back. But yeah, good stuff happening here at Home Brewing DIY. It feels good to be back. I guess that’s pretty much it for announcements. I don’t really have a ton going on other than keep Home Brewing do some big brew day. That’s coming up on May 7, right? Real quick. I have committed to brew batch. It’s been a while since I bought a five gallon batch. I’m doing mainly 1.5 gallon batches. So kind of excited to brew a bigger, uh, batch of beer. And so that will be out and maybe they’ll, uh, take some pictures, check us out on our social media. At Home Brewing, DIY Beer is our website, and At Homebrewing DIY is all of our social handles. All right, let’s dive into it. Let’s hop into the show and listen to this week’s interview with Peter Simons. I’d like to welcome Peter Simons to the show. Peter is a, uh, returning guest. He’s actually been on the show before. He’s a brewing historian, home Brewer and author. He wrote such books as Gil Brews. If you look at the, uh, history in our show notes, when he did write that book, he was on the show kind of having a discussion with us about that. And now he’s coming back on the show. He’s been doing some cool DIY gadgets, and we’re just going to have a little chat about some home brewing gadgets. So welcome to the show, Peter. How are you doing?
Peter Symons: I’m good, thanks. Hopefully you’re well as well.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, doing great. Glad to be back to making podcasts again and excited to be talking to you again. So you reached out to me because you were like, hey, I’ve been messing around with all these gadgets, and you know that this is something that I talk about quite often. And one of the projects you mentioned that you’ve been using for the last five years is Brew Pilas. Uh, and I’d love to talk about that because I’ve used a lot of different versions of brewpie, but I’ve never actually used Brew Pyle. So why don’t you talk a bit about that project and how you’ve been using that in your brewery?
Peter Symons: Yeah, I started with brew pilots, and at that time, I, uh, didn’t know what it was. About five years ago, I had no idea what GitHub was. I’m still struggling, um, with that, but that’s another story. Um, but, uh, I’ve been using a very rudimentary fermentation control on my fridge, which was basically, uh, it was an analog dial. You set the dial to the temperature you wanted and it turned the fridge off. Then I moved to a little bit of, uh, an improvement where I had one where it would turn the heater on with a heat belt. Uh, and although I’m in Australia, you do get fluctuations in temperature between the day and the night, and that’s enough to upset your fermentation process. Then I played around with Pic in the past, and I’ve done a little bit of programming back in the dim Dark ages, basic programming and things like that. And, uh, it appealed to me, the idea of using brew pilots. I do have, uh, a pie that I had, uh, but there was a lot of messing around with, um, having to set, uh, it up and headless and all sorts of other stuff. Whereas Brupeyless couple, um, of Control Relays and Veto Tie, whose project it is. Uh, it gave a good impression, uh, of being something, uh, that had been written by somebody that knew about brewing. It had, um, all the brew pie. I’ve never used brewpie, but the brew pie less originally had the same type of screens and it ran on an eight two, double six. So all those things sort of intrigued me and I put one together and I, uh, controlled a brew with it and he kept developing it and gradually, uh, included ice spindle so that the gravity, uh, could be displayed, as well as basically the, uh, on and off temperatures for the fermentation, uh, control. And as he developed it, I went, oh, okay. I could probably make an ice bundle. It took me, uh, probably six months because the original ice bundle, the design of it, needed a 3D print and didn’t have a 3D printer. Didn’t know anybody that had one went online in Sydney and found somebody that would print you some 3D. I think they’re called sleds. So I did that and arranged to meet this guy who I didn’t know from a bar of soap in the center of Sydney, uh, and exchanged, uh, the Brown paper bag that, um, had the, uh, 3D prints in them. I used, uh, uh, a board which had all the, uh, soldered through holes. And then you wire it up to suit, uh, and I looked on Dutch sites, uh, and German sites that, uh, have made eye spindles. And I got it to work and it did good service until I probably lasted twelve months until we had this slight, unfortunate leakage. And, um, so I spindle number one is now my test eye spindle because it’s died. It’s terribly sad, but it’s died. So I built a second one with a different form of sled, which was much more solid. And by the way, I bought enough bits to make ten of these because at the time, getting it from, uh, overseas typically means China. More meant China then. And I thought, well, I’ll get enough bits and I invested in, uh, some PCBs to go with the sled I have in my hand at the moment. I spin on number two. Icepindle number two is still going strong. So, uh, if you’re careful and make sure the lid is on properly and don’t get too excited with it, it seems, um, to last. And my other one, which is a much more modern interpretation, which does away with having to, uh, do 3D printing, is the one that has the PCB. And the PCB goes into a smaller pedaling tube, uh, and is a much more elegant, uh, design. Basically, that one is in the brew at the moment and has been working well. And I’ve got a couple that I’ve not yet constructed because I think it’s handy to have a spare given there is a probability that it will leak at some stage through the cap. But it seems to have held up pretty well with the under pressure fermentation, um, I haven’t gone more than, say. And I’ve not noticed any adverse effects on the ice Pindle itself. And brutal Pilas continues to evolve. Um, he’s on version four point, um, two at the moment, and he’s, uh, not quite released that yet. And I’ve got an ESP 32 with that running, uh, in a test mode. Uh, so, yeah, as things have developed the, uh, idea of pressure fermentation, I have fermented under pressure a couple of times using, um, a Kegland. All, uh, rounder fermenter, uh, and I tend now to use it more for spending. So when I’m perhaps five points off terminal gravity, I’ll put the sponding valve on, uh, and Brew pilots has had the, um, facility to monitor the pressure and also a capping using a solenoid. Um, now I have the solenoid. I’ve had it for 15 months and I haven’t quite got around to that yet. And I have to share with you, I had a bit of a disaster. Welcome to Homebrew.
Speaker UNK: Yes.
Peter Symons: I had not been drinking, but it is a, um, relatively simple mistake to make. So, on the top of the all rounder, uh, there are two posts. One is for getting liquid out and one is for gas in. Now, if you actually and I had it connected up to my transducer to monitor, uh, the pressure. And I did all my brooday. I set everything up, let it all pitch the yeast, did all that good stuff. And then that was it. Done for the day, had a beer. Next morning, I go out to see how the fermentation is going. And the floor is sticky.
Colter Wilson: Never want that to happen, ever.
Peter Symons: Uh, no. And I opened the fridge insert swearing here. I had connected the wrong one and, uh, the fermenting work had pushed itself up right through, uh, the transducer. Um, and I have to say, the transducer has not survived. I don’t know whether it didn’t like the stickiness, um, or whatever, but it simply no longer works. So I’ve ordered some replacement ones, because that, to me, is an interesting feature, uh, to be able to monitor the pressure.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I think that’s very, very cool. Uh, let’s, uh, talk about kind of your tech stack here. And really, that’s what we’re talking about is a cool little tech stack. Uh, right now, when you think about, like, your brew day, you’re brewing electric right now, right? You use an electric brewery?
Peter Symons: I do now, but that’s not where I started. I used propane gas, uh, for many years.
Colter Wilson: Uh.
Peter Symons: Um, I used to be a Herms Brewer because I built my own home system, but I found I wasn’t using it. Um, I could do step mashes. I could do all sorts of good things. I could do double batches quite easily. But as I’ve got older, I, uh, don’t tend to do that quite so much. So I built my own one vessel system and I now use an Auburns DSPR 320, uh, which controls both the mash and the boil. And the way I have it set it up, you can put in your own steps. So for the mashing, for example, I have all the standard steps that I might want to use. And then because it’s got the adjusting dial on the front, you can tweak it. So you can put in your standard, let’s say, 65 degree for your main mesh, whatever that is, in F. And, um, if you need to tweak it up a little bit, then you just push the button, rotate it up, push the button again, and you’re up at the next level. It’s a very simple device to use. And once you finish, say, mashing out, it gets to the step there and it’ll automatically, uh, well, if you program it that way, it’ll automatically move into the boil mode. So while you’re draining off the last out of, uh, the mold pipe, you can start coming to the boil. And in the boil steps, I’ve got it in such a way that all my favorite hop addition times, uh, are in there. So I’ve got one, obviously, at boil, 30 minutes, 15, uh, and I’ve got the facility to, uh, adjust the amount, uh, of electricity going to, uh, the element. So it’s quite easy to set it up to do a Whirlpool, uh, and all those steps are programmed in. I don’t have to use them, but each step generates an alarm. The way I’ve got it set, uh, up. So it’s a semiautomated system. What I have noticed is that I will hit my targets more often than not, uh, because the amount of evaporation, uh, is pretty constant because you’re using the same routine time after time. I think consistency, uh.
Colter Wilson: Is one of those things to make good beer. Is that as long as your system is dialed and you know exactly what it’s going to do, you’re going to be able to, I think just talking to you over the years, you make all different kinds of beer, right? From British ales to, uh, I know you wrote a historical book on just the Australian Sparkling Ale. Right. So, uh, when you got your system super dialed, it gives you the flexibility to make these different styles, have different step routines and know exactly how your equipment is going to act. Would you say that’s the kind of situation you’re in?
Peter Symons: Yeah, I think you got all these, um, different. I guess you guys would call them levers. I’d, uh, call them a lever, um, dials there’s, dials that you can adjust. And when I’m doing a recreation beer and, uh, I’ve not done all the recreation beers. Quite a few of my mates have done some as well. Uh, what I want to be able to do is it’s usually playing with the ingredients rather than the process. So if you actually have a relatively standardized process, both on the hot side with the mashing and the boiling and then with the fermentation, you at least have a level of certainty that the recreation recipe that you publish is, um, something that if somebody was to brew it on their system, which is bound to be, um, different, all things being equal, it should be a drinkable beer. It may not be a beer to your taste. It may not be something you will ever brew again. And I’ve done a few of those.
Colter Wilson: But.
Peter Symons: It’S sort of like experimental archaeological brewing sort of thing, if you know what I mean.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I do. And I think that’s awesome because. And I love that you’ve just kind of set it, uh, that way where it’s like, hey, as long as my process is dialed on the hot side, the cold side, I have variables I have a lot of control over. Then what that does is, allows you to just let the ingredients kind of do their thing. Right? And when you’re looking at a lot of the historical beers that you’ve made throughout your home brewing journey, and being an author, I think that that’s really, really important because, for example, I think in our last conversation, we were talking about the guy beers, the Cornish beers that you redid. Right. And one of the things that you had mentioned to me was I always think they’re going to be using these British style hops. There’s a lot of Goldings and all this. But a lot of times they were using things like American hops were coming over because that was what they were getting agriculturally at the time. And you would think and so what you normally assume, like, hey, they’re using Foggles. They weren’t. They were using things like cluster. And so it’s kind of unique in the fact that if you’re using these different ingredients, as long as your process is dialed, you can kind of really let the different ingredients that they were using in those times really stand out and make a beer that it may not be exactly the same, but pretty close, right?
Peter Symons: Yeah. What you’ve, um, just described is really the rub, if you like, uh, no hop pun intended. Uh, because of different eras, different things happen both in Australia and in the UK. Uh, the post the Great War, great deal of protectionism. Uh, and uh, uh, the brewers, as an organization said that, uh, they would use 80% local hops and 20% imported. Now, this is the period of prohibition in the US. Uh, and, um, a lot of American hops would have been really cheap. Uh, and they were really cheap because I’ve seen the ledgers. And, uh, cheap for a production brewery, cheap and decent quality is probably a good combination. So you do get external constraints. Um, so in the UK, they had a similar issue in that the hot farmers were all going bust and they also had a protectionism type scheme. Uh, and those schemes fundamentally change the flavors of the beers in those periods. So if we’re in the early 20th century, we’ve got a lot of protectionism around the world. We got probably oversupply of hops, which would influence the beers that, uh, were being brewed, uh, in the late, just going backwards a bit. In, uh, the late 19th century, uh, hops, uh, is very much a commodity from wherever. I’ve, um, seen logs with Bavarian hops used quite often in, um, British brewing and, uh, also in Australian brewing, Californians crop up, uh, lots of times, which you could infer would be Cluster. However, that may or may not be quite correct, because the brewing books tend to use the name of the hop factor or the hop supplier or possibly the, uh, grower, and not so much the variety. And whilst Cluster was the predominant variety, it wasn’t the only variety grown in the US. Foggle was grown and, uh, also SATS, um, uh, which they call Bohemians, which is, uh, where it’s from, Bohemia. So different areas, different things. It does mean that, uh, you can, uh, use different combinations of what we would now call traditional hops in your beers. And they tend, uh, not to be the Citra mosaic that are currently all over the place and sort of leading to a homogenization of beer flavor, which is unfortunately somewhat boring.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I think. Don’t get me wrong, I like, uh, a well made, juicy IPA. I think that’s just kind of the trend right now, but I think homogenization is a great word for it. Right. You walk into a brewery in the United States right now and they’re basically going to show you the five different hazy IPAs that they’re selling. Right. And really no other beers are really flying off the shelves. It’s kind of funny how 20 years ago it was all water beer Budweiser. Right. Which I’m sure the American breweries still sell a ton of. But in the end, breweries have to sell what sells. Right. And that’s kind of what they get into. And then they all kind of become the same and then beer tastes and trends change based on what their customers are drinking and what they’re buying. Right. I would agree that there’s definitely a lot of beers right now that are very much the same. So for me and at least my group of friends, what we do now is I switch up my winter beers to my summer beers and try to get something a little bit different based on the time of year just because of all that. Right. I like craft beer. I don’t necessarily want to drink the same type of beer all the time. And I feel like that’s kind of no matter where you go, that’s what’s kind of happening with the beer world in general.
Peter Symons: Yeah. What you’ve described is if you went to a craft brewery in Australia, you might get a few outlier beers that are a bit, uh, different, but they’re mostly hazy, which, uh, is not particularly a style as such that I enjoy. I like something that’s a bit more like beer, particularly bitter beer, because that, to me, is what it is. And I have noticed in the UK, you are seeing, uh, a lot of the golden style of ale are using American hops, and I brewed, uh, English, uh, type gold nails, um, with Belma, which, uh, is a US hop, which has got quite a distinctive flavor. Uh, but I tend to steer away from the, uh, I don’t mind Galaxy. Galaxy is all right. However, my story with Galaxy is many years ago, when it first came out, uh, I brewed a smash beer with that, uh, and I hadn’t really taken into account the potency of Galaxy, and it took about three months conditioning in the cake to calm down enough to actually make it drinkable.
Colter Wilson: It’s some powerful stuff, but also lots of that kind of citrusy stone fruity. It can get pretty juicy, right, especially using it for those types of things. Back to your tech. Stack a bit on the cold side when we talk about your brew pilots at the beginning. This is managing your fermentation, and it’s also giving you a lot of data. How are you using that data when you’re making some of the styles that you make? So let’s say you’re recreating a historic style of beer. They talk about a fermentation, uh, schedule. Are you trying to mimic that fermentation schedule or are you trying to just get close? What’s your approach to that? And how do you use the technology to kind of mimic those things?
Peter Symons: Right. That’s a Biggie. Most of the, um, industrial processes don’t translate well to a 20 liter, five gallon batch size. What I have tried to do is to make, uh, sure I have picked a yeast strain that is going to get to the right sort of terminal gravity, uh, that the historic beer had. I’m not a larger person, but, uh, I manfully did a recreation recipe, uh, uh, called from a number of sources, uh, one of which was an analytical, I guess it was more like an endorsement in the medical press about how nutritious and non alcoholic this beer was. It was non alcoholic in relative terms to Australian beers of the period, because it was only about 4% and its, uh, final gravity was around 1020 from this analysis. Now, that poses a really big challenge today with, uh, modern Maltz, and I’ve done it twice now, the second one, I seem to have got there, but I had to change the process. The match temperature would seem to be insanely high. They used to do decoction mashing, uh, which will give you a level of unfairmentables, and I put it in, um, the fermenter and fermented it out. I think I used.
Speaker UNK: Um.
Peter Symons: S one, um, 89, something like that. And because it was the least attenuative yeast that I could find, uh, and manage the fermentation with the Brew PILs. Uh, the way I manage the fermentation is the actual temperature monitoring and the steps, uh, you can program that into the Brew Pilots, so you could go pitch it, I don’t know, a bit warm for, uh, a lag of, say, pitch about 17, drop it down to ten, uh, after half a day, and then let it ferment and then go up for a diasporal rest. And, uh, you can program that all into the Brew Pilot, where I monitor, uh, and where I do my recipe development is in Brew Father. Uh, and you can send your data from Brew Pilas and the ice spindle into Brew Father. And Brew Father is where, in effect, all, uh, my logging takes place because it’s got the great. I think you are familiar with Brew Father, aren’t you?
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I love the logging. How it’ll take the data from your Brew Pilots or your ice spindle or tilt hydrometer, and it brings all that data in and charts it all out and attaches it to your recipe. Right. And when we think about recreating, and not just recreating a different recipe, but, like, recreating the same beer that you’ve made before, uh, and trying to be consistent, which, as you know, is the hardest thing to do as a Brewer. I think it’s easy to make good beer. It’s hard to make a good beer ten times. Right. And so that is really where I think Brew Father shines over pretty much any other software.
Peter Symons: Yeah. And Thomas is just so responsive to questions and recipe development. Um, we talked about sort of trying to standardize the general process, which I reasonably comfortable with. But when you’ve got a fermentation, uh, where you’re trying to get a very high terminal gravity, it does take a couple of GOs. And, uh, you need to know what you did before so that you can change it to see whether perhaps the yeast should be different, whether your mash should be different. Um, but one of the things, um, that, uh, I guess it’s more of an irritation than an annoyance. Uh, you can have a, uh, very small OLED screen, uh, with the Brew Pilots, which, uh, is an old money, is probably about an inch. So it is quite small. And all my stuff is in the garage. And, uh, I tried before Christmas to integrate a TFT display, uh, two, um, .8 inches. Funny in a metric world, uh, that you still get inches all over the place. I think there’s a country that might be responsible for that, but I can’t quite bring them to mind.
Colter Wilson: I wish we were on the metric system, too. I’ll just say that, uh.
Peter Symons: This wonderful thing called GitHub and people that put stuff up there because they’re just interested in programming or brewing or whatever. So I downloaded the version from Vitota’s, uh, Brew Pilot and um. Um, I was using, uh, Microsoft. I think it’s Microsoft. Um, now the visual source code, uh, um, uh, Visual Studio. That’s it.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, with the programming. Uh, ID is what that is.
Peter Symons: Yeah, with platform, IO, all of these things, because I just wanted to fiddle around the edges. That was good enough for me. But what I wanted was, uh, to actually get the data onto this 2.8, 320 by 240 Pixel color, uh, display, so that when I went out to the garage, I could just look at it. I didn’t have to have my phone in my, uh, pocket. I didn’t want to have to log into something. If I want to see the full picture, then just on, uh, the iPad or whatever, you can look at Bluefather. So I wanted something that would show me the state of play in the garage when I walked out there that was bigger than the little OLED, and I couldn’t grasp or understand because I’m not a programmer how to modify the existing code. Uh, and then I had this idea, uh, and the Internet is disparaged, really. But if you spent a long time researching for historical stuff, the techniques that you use for researching are equally applicable to finding other things. So after YouTubing and looking at snippets of code, and I built something called, uh, Firmwatch and Firm Watch is an eight two double six with a screen. And we’re going to go full on geek. Now, MQTT, um, takes an MQTT stream that’s pushed out from Bru PILs. And then my adventurous thing was I didn’t know anything about APIs till about January this year. And I played with the Weather app, and that had an API, open weather. And I thought, okay, and Brew Father has an API. Uh, and I had a bit of correspondence with Thomas because I don’t know what I’m doing, and he pointed me in the right direction. So you can actually, uh, send a get request to the Brew Father API, uh, and it will send you back the information about the Brew. The tricky thing was that you needed to do a two shot process. You had to first get, um, the batch details, and then you’d get a batch ID. And once you had the batch ID, you could then do another request, and it would give you the latest readings. And the latest readings include all the I spindle stuff. So I was able to integrate into my display device information from Brew Father, information from Brew Pilas. And then I did some calculations. Well, why not? I decided that apparent attenuation would be an interesting thing to, um, display. And I was able to get the data from Brew Father. And I had the current ice Bindle present gravity. And after four, uh, months of messing about, about a week ago, I published it on GitHub. So there, um, you go, it’s not impossible to do these things, but it does take time. And, boy, I was at the learning curve, and I’m not done yet. I’m still trying a couple of things, uh, which will perhaps be interesting because, uh, the Ispindle software works very well. But this guy in, uh, Sweden has also on GitHub, um, has something called Gravity, um, Mon, where you replace the firmware on Ispindle hardware. And, uh, it gives you the ability to not just send one stream of data to Brew Pilot or to Brewfather, but it’s got MQTT data that you can get out as well. So it struck me that that’s an opportunity to explore. So I have downloaded his software onto my trusty test. I spindle and I’m playing with that at the moment. Um, is there something I could be doing on my time elsewhere? Uh, yes, I should be writing more chapters in my book, but I’m not playing with code that I don’t fully understand.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. Well, and that’s kind of the, uh, thing about rabbit holes. Right. Is you start down one you’re like, yeah, I have this problem, and I just want to solve this one. And that’s, uh, kind of the cool thing about open source software is that you have APIs you can access. Right. So I work in tech. That is actually what I do for a job. I’m in tech sales. So I talk to people. I actually sell to restaurants and breweries. And so I talk to people all the time about technologies, APIs and things like that, pretty much on the daily. And a lot of private companies actually guard, uh, those APIs because they don’t want you to have access to them without paying. Right. And one of the cool things about the home brewing world is that a lot of the software you’re talking about, Brew Pilot, the Eye spindle, the different softwares that, uh, you’re listing out here. Brew father, though it is private software. He’s pretty open with the data. Right. He’s like, hey, if you want it, you get it. But it is a pay for product. Right. And to get access to that, I get paid $20 a year. It’s not super expensive.
Peter Symons: Of all the things I subscribe to, it’s the best value going around. And I, uh, highly, um, recommend it.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, definitely. I mean, for $19 a year, you get a lot. Right. And so in the end, what these do and what the home brewing world kind of does is it gives you this access to things that normally are going to be closed off.
Peter Symons: Right.
Colter Wilson: And I’ll give you an example. I have this really amazing chess board. I’m very into, um, chess as well. I like to play chess. And I have this chess board that, um, connects to Chess.com, and it connects to Lichess, which are websites that you can play to people on the Internet. And I can actually play on a physical chess board against you, Peter, who’s playing on your computer. Right. That’s kind of the idea over the internet. And the one thing that I look at, this chess board that I have, I won’t name the brand, is that I have to use their proprietary app to get it to connect to other things, which is fine, but I’d really love to just have the open source data and kind of do what I want with it. Right. Because there’s some features missing that I’d like to have. And when you get into proprietary stuff, you’re kind of limited. Whereas with these open source projects, if you know a little bit about what you’re doing, you have a problem to solve. You can hop into some forms and you can kind of get there. In all reality, I think you’ve got one of the few instances where you can walk in without having to have a phone or a dedicated laptop, but you’ve basically got a screen sitting, uh, there that is 100% dedicated to your home brewery and has all the charts and graphs plotted out in a way that makes sense to your brain. Right. And that’s the problem you solved, right?
Peter Symons: Yes. As we started out, you probably got the impression I like having the control over the whole thing. Uh, and the open source software, whilst not necessarily perfect, does give you the, uh, opportunity to tweak it to suit yourself. And I’ve sort of taken that to the logical extension of actually writing how to do it. Uh, and I’ve put it up on YouTube because a lot of the things I found, you would get a snippet of information because somebody’s trying to solve a particular issue. However, nobody actually puts the whole thing together in the form of a logical step by step process as to how you actually, uh, make the thing work, which is uploading the firmware. The fact that you’ve got to make a base 64 key to access Brew father. These things were all challenges. I spent, uh, best part of a day because I had not read, uh, the documentation. When I reread, it was perfectly clear when I first read it, I did not understand the significance of what it said. It’s classic. You need to do it, you need to fail. You need to do it again. And I finally cracked it and I’d left the colon out between the API key and the rest of it. And once I did that, uh, it was a Eureka moment. My wife, I come out bouncing out of the office that I sold something and she’s, um, going, yeah, okay, yeah.
Colter Wilson: My wife gives me that eye roll as well.
Peter Symons: Eye roll is exactly what it is.
Colter Wilson: Yes. Now, Peter, obviously you’ve written a couple of great books. You’re using this technology to kind of do this. I know that you’re probably working on another book at some point. Right. What’s the next big thing in brewing, um, you want to tackle?
Peter Symons: Well, I’ve been distracted a bit. Well, quite a lot actually with this technological stuff, um, of recent times, but, uh, I guess during the various lockdowns. So over the last two years, I’ve got, uh, about five, uh, chapters worth, which will hopefully become a prequel to my other Australian books, Bronze Bruce and 06:00 Bruce. Uh, I’ve found more information. I haven’t found too much information about beers to recreate, but I perhaps can, uh, resolve some of the marketing myths, uh, that have been perpetuated about beers in Australia by actually having solid evidence and research as to why what people say is true is not actually true. Is that polite enough?
Colter Wilson: No, that’s great. I mean, look, I deal with marketing departments that work as well. And trust me, marketing definitely plays a huge part into, uh, basically perpetuating myths. The story that they want to tell and the version of reality that they want to be. Right.
Peter Symons: And it usually starts out with a nugget of truth.
Colter Wilson: Yes, exactly.
Peter Symons: And then it gets inverted, commas improved upon. So, yeah, I have possibly three or, uh, four different strands or themes, if you’d like, for the next book. And I’m, uh, going to go to Canberra next month to the National Library and have a rummage in some of the archives there, which I’ve not been able, uh, to do because of the various covert restrictions.
Colter Wilson: Uh, yeah, well, obviously, I have read all your books, and I will say that they’ve been passed. The copies that I’ve bought have now been passed around through my entire home brew, uh, club. So huge fan of your work and some of the beer recipes that you’ve drummed up.
Peter Symons: So just let me get this clear. You’ve been acting as a library instead of people buying my book with extra copy.
Colter Wilson: One of those things, they bring it to the club and somebody’s like, oh, I want to check out that book, and then it gets passed around. The good news is that if they like it, they always tend to buy it. So that is a good.
Peter Symons: That’s good.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. Because if it ends up being the kind of book down someone’s alley, which I’ll use Gilbert as an example. Right. You’ve got to be in the British styles, right? That’s just the, uh, kind of book that it is. And I have a few people in my home brew club that love those British styles. Uh, I did a loaner. We’ve talked about Jim on the show before I did a loaner out to him. And you know what? Jim now has the book himself. Right. And those are his style. The dude only makes Belgian and British styles, period. That’s his Mo, right? Yeah. Write down his alleys. And he does also German luggers. So let’s get that out, uh, of the way, too. He does that. So, um, to, uh, me, it’s something where when I look at the history that you’ve pulled up and, uh, your books, I look at them as something where you kind of are looking at old brew logs. You’re kind of telling the story from beer, from a recipe perspective and not a marketing perspective. To me, that’s really what gets down to me in the home Brewer sense of why I enjoy that style of book. Because, like you said, how many times have we heard the IPA story about it being on a boat? So with enough, um, hops to get it to India, blah, blah, blah, you know, is any of that true? Who knows? Right. But the fact is that there is probably a kernel of truth in there. Who knows if that’s really a true story, right? There’s a ton of that in the beer world.
Peter Symons: Yeah. And at an unnamed archive that I’ve been to in Australia, um, I found a room full of what the, uh, various marketing departments thought was important, which didn’t include any brewing journals or logs at all.
Colter Wilson: No talks about.
Peter Symons: They had obviously been chucked in the skip at some stage during one of the numerous takeovers. It’s disappointing, but there’s hidden stuff out there somewhere. People that have worked in breweries, their father, grandfather, great, uh, grandfather might have a diary. The diary Scot what they did day by day. And those books are absolute gold, if you can come across one.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, I agree. And to be honest, those are also the kind of things that’s what intrigues me about process. What are they doing on the daily, what’s the reality of the world around in that time and why they had to make the choices they make? That’s what’s important to me in beer history. Right. Not necessarily the stories they want to tell us to sell more beer because we have plenty of that today.
Peter Symons: Yeah. And the monotony of life in a production brewery, in the tooth books, the mashing schedule, uh, same as usual. Next page, same as usual. They would churn in the same beer out. And the beginning of the book was the matching schedule. And that’s what they did every day.
Colter Wilson: It’s not the most, um, glamorous thing, but, man, it does make a fun beverage, doesn’t it?
Peter Symons: When done properly. Absolutely.
Colter Wilson: Well, Peter, I want to thank you for coming on Home Brewing DIY. I’m excited to kind of see what you’ve been doing with your tech stack. It’s super cool to see even somebody who’s, uh, making all these historical styles. Right. You still utilizing the technology to get that consistent beer out there and even diving into some coding. I love it. A couple of questions for you. If, uh, you could do me a favor and send me over a link to that YouTube video that you, um, made. I love to share that with some of our listeners. And also, I will put links, um, he self publishes these books. Right. And so I’ll get a link over to Triton Books for you guys, uh, so that you can check out some of the books that Peter has written. They’re great books. And the good news is that because they’re self published, if you buy these books, they’re directly supporting Peter and the work he’s doing in home brewing and beer history. So, yeah, thanks for coming on Home Brewing DIY Peter, it’s been great.
Peter Symons: Thanks a lot.
Colter Wilson: Um, I’d like to thank Peter for coming on the show. It was a great conversation. Great to see some of the cool work he’s doing with his tech stack and applying it to making historical beers. Such a cool conversation. And I just want to thank Peter for the time and so head on over to Homebrewingdiy Beer. There’s a list of links to all of his books and to learn about Peter and some of the projects he’s working on. You can also follow us on all of our socials um, you can find us at Home Brewing DIY we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all the things. I even have a TikTok that I haven’t posted to in probably a year, but it does exist. Follow us there. Maybe I’ll start posting there, too. That’s it for this week. I’ll talk to you next week. It’s on home brewing. Diy.
