When HERMAN was first conceived I was a poor student living in a shoebox (small flat) with no workshop. The original machine was cobbled together bits of plastic buckets and copper pipe with compression fittings. It was much easier in 2001 for me to build electronic circuits and program computers than build fancy brew sculptures.

The real strength of that original machine was its control system. It certainly wasn't his good looks!

When I finally got a real job with a real house with a real workshop, it was time to improve HERMAN. The biggest problem was that the job was now so demanding that I didn't really have time to make massive changes. I did find an old computer desk on wheels that eventually became the structure that held all of HERMAN.

Because it was not well designed, it suffered from all sorts of problems - the most significant was that a boil-over would leak hot wort directly into a draw that held all the control circuitry. This happened more than once and I am still amazed that it only ever led to temporary loss of control functions, rather than a complete machine melt down.

In the photo below, the control draw is the white box sitting under the mash tun.

One of the urgent tasks then was to upgrade the control system. The open drawer was replaced by a sealed box. A kettle was also incorporated onto the structure. Before this we had been using a gas fired kettle outside, which was a real pain in the winter.

While it was great to have the new kettle and counter-flow chiller integrated into the brew sculpture, the little computer desk was now overloaded with things. But we had plans to build a well planned sculpture that we would be proud of ...

And then one day while walking the dogs along our usual path that took us between a golf course and the back of factory warehouses, a couple of stainless steel shelving racks appeared. The factory in question was a commercial kitchen fitout company - these racks had been pulled out of an old job. With some quick negotiating, they became the owners of a carton of beer, and we became the owners of a brewing sculpture frame.

We figured that the machine we are currently using is version 5.5. It is still in transition to version 6 because while the physical structure is pretty much finished, the control system has not yet been upgraded.

I've not had too many spare moments of late - but today is the first day of four weeks leave, so I expect to be able to do some serious HERMAN development in between a couple of weeks overseas visiting family.

With the few snippets of time I've been going back over old posts on the Australian Craftbrewer website. I've never been good at documenting things (which is why I'm finding blogging useful), so I didn't really know when HERMAN first made beer. Until now that is ...

HERMAN has just taken his first steps! 
Yes, that's right, the brewing robot is 
doing his stuff, keeping my mash at an 
even 66C while I type.

Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:03:31 +1000

You can find the whole post here.

The picture below is an original shot of that first machine. As you can see it is pretty ugly - a mishmash of plastic buckets and nylon hoses. But it did work - and quite well too - and on a student's budget.

The insulated vessel on the left is the mash tun. The black thing on top of the wooden pieces is the mixer motor that is still in use today. The vessel on the right is the hot liquor tun. Below it to the right is the most expensive part of the system - the March pump.

To the left of the pump set back under the shelf is the original control circuitry. It used a parallel interface card connected to a laptop computer running Windows 3.1. It was coded in VB3. One LED is lit on the control box which I think means that the pump was running.

The piping that disappears down towards the left of picture is the runoff into the kettle which sat in the bath tub. This first HERMAN machine sat on the washing machine.

There is a screen shot below of the original control program. It shows the layout on screen much neater than the real thing actually was ...

My ProMash records show this beer to be a Strong Belgian Ale. I did not even make a note in ProMash that this was the birth of HERMAN! It was all-grain brew number 17, almost a year since the first one.