Team:London Biohackspace/product-design

making better beer

What is the SYNBIO Brewery DIY Brew Kit

The SYNBIO Brewery DIY-Brewkit is an all-in-one open-source toolbox designed to allow home brew enthusiasts to create novel brewing yeast strains and become involved in the burgeoning DIY-bio community. The DIY-Brewkit will comprise a set of sample yeast strains as well as a library of genetic parts that allow users to genetically modify existing commercially available brewing strains in order to produce new and interesting types of beer. The DIY-Brewkit gene library consists of a variety of genes from different organisms that when expressed in brewing yeast strains will alter the taste, smell, colour and nutritional content of the beer produced. Additional genes will also be included that allow users to modify the expression levels of these genes via RNA interference so that a wide range of unique beers can be created and perfected. Finally, by providing an open-source set of components for working with yeast we hope to lower the entry barrier for new and existing community labs looking to participate in iGEM as well as making it easier for community labs to share resouces. Download the DIY BrewKit information sheet here to find out more.

How the DIY Brew Kit make SYNBIO accessible

Our main goal for the design of the DIY Brew Kit was to make it simple and easy to use. The kit includes 6 stains designed in our lab and a manual booklet. The booklet plays an important role in making the biology easy to understand. We give the users an insight into the biology involved in our project with simple language. The point of kit is to give brewing enthusiasts an opportunity to not only experiment with the synthetic yeast, but to think about how synthetic yeast can develop their yeast library. We encourage the users to 1) make beer with 100% our beer 2) Try out different combinations of our strains 3)mix it with other brewing strains.

Download the instruction manual for the brewkit here