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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

The reason why San Diego has such a craft brew scene is that it has a lot of underpaid microbiologists.

The people studying yeast metabolism in grad school were always the ones with the best beer (especially the ones that created mutant strains). I think the two might be related.

One of my gateways into Making was during grad school when my housemate brewed beer. He wanted to make a counterflow wort chiller, went to Home Depot, bought some parts, assembled the whole thing, and it worked perfectly. I was completely blown away you could make "scientific" apparatus from Home Depot. And immensely jealous.

Heh. That reminds me of the time in grad school where I needed a liquid disposal system for an arraying robot. We had this great ($$$) robot, but the liquid waste needed to be manually emptied every few hours. It was non-toxic and just went down a sink.

A quick trip to Lowe’s to get PVC fittings and pipes, and I suddenly made my own scientific equipment and saved me some time!

What kind of materials are food grade there? Sound like a fun project

IIRC we passed the wort through PVC, and the cold water through copper tubing wrapped around the PVC. PVC is generally food safe and we cleaned it, IIRC, with IPA (isopropyl alcohol, not india pale ale).

I got a real imposter syndrome from the whole project and my housemate went on to be a famous microscopist (but later rage-quit to leave for industry). I build microscopes using 3d printers and other easily sourced bits. But Home Depot is a terrible place to source materials. They are the lowest quality.

Most of the plumbing stuff will be, because it's also used for plumbing (for water that people will drink).

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