(music)
Narrator: Beer. It’s been produced by mankind dating
back to at least 3500 B.C., and historians
have argued that beer is responsible for building
some of the world’s first civilizations.
Even icons of American History. (Simpson’s
theme music) (Beer). (Good afternoon everybody)
No, no, not these guys. Thomas Jefferson,
Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, and George Washington
were all home-brewers. Here at Northern Illinois
University, a group of innovative engineering
students created a nano home-brewing system
designed to automate the brewing cycle, increase
process efficiency, and improve portability.
All the while, meeting regulated safety standards,
and of course, making a great tasting survey
set. 
Huzma Shamsuddin: Essentially, almost every single portion
of this we’re able to apply the majority
of classes that we actually took here, and
we touched on thermodynamics, heat transfer,
electronic controls; we also went into fluid
dynamics, static structures, and a lot of
computer simulation. So, we’re able tie
all of these elements together on top of some
computer programming to actually make this
process automated. 
Nick Skuban: Basically, I started off
as a home-brewer about three years ago, and
I just wanted to make the process easier.
I mean, I went through it and it takes about
five hours right now to actually make a full
batch and I want to get that time down. Okay,
how this thing works is we start off with
about ten gallons of water in here that will
heat up to about one-hundred and fifty-five
degrees, we’ll transfer over eight gallons
of that over into the second keg; that’s
where the grains and the barley are all located,
so after an hour of mashing process with this
whole thing, it’ll like convert those starches
from the grains into fermentable sugars that
we can use later on, and then after the mashing
is complete it will transfer over into this
last keg over here, which will heat up to
a boiling temperature; and then we add the
hops to it, and then basically after it’s
all done with the hop additions, we’ll crash
cool this thing. we want to get it down to
about seventy degrees as fast as we can. This
is just to prevent any kind of like bacterial
growth or anything, basically have a big vat
of sugar water that’s at eighty degrees;
bacteria is just going to want to grow in
there, so we crash cool it, and then right
here on this spout, obviously the hose won’t
be attached, but we’ll have a bucket located
underneath that will drain out all the good
fermentable work, and then add the hops and
then it’ll ferment for about two weeks.
Joshua Berger: This is a practical application of everything
that we have learned in this… in the mechanical
engineering field, so we can take this, we
can apply it, and then we can say, we designed
this, we applied it, this is how I can apply
this to your job.
(music)
