Sharing their passion for beer, six SFU students have teamed up to create Brewstr: a startup that facilitates simple beer brewing at home. Specifically, Brewstr is an automated home brewing system controlled by an application on mobile phones.

Ryan Lymburner,  a fifth-year Mechatronics student at SFU who helped to create Brewstr, described the beer-making process as “tedious,” “boring,” and “quite [a lot] of manual work.” Brewstr was designed to allow users without the usual knowledge or experience to make beer and cider that can be personalized to suit the owner’s taste.

The Technology Entrepreneurship@SFU program at Surrey campus was where it all started. The program’s main goal is to successfully commercialize projects and establish new startups. There Lymburner first met his team: Jeremy Thompson, Derek Muxworthy, and Jordan Sciberras, all of whom are Mechatronics students, and Business students Karan Thakur and Kavi Sekhon.

Lymburner called his team “a great blend of everything,” describing their diverse skill sets and backgrounds.

Brewstr has gained much attention from local media, despite having begun in January of this year. Lymburner added that the team is very “motivated” to know that their projects are gaining popularity  and “going [quickly]” to the next stage.

Regarding Brewstr’s near future, the complete prototype will be finished soon and ready for public tests and funding. In addition, the team will work closely with local breweries to ensure that the quality of the beer is suited to the tastes of consumers.

Lymburner and his team see their inventions as a “complement” to the local beer industry, rather than a competitor to it. They suggested that local breweries could create their own ingredient packs and kits for purchase, allowing them to share their recipe with people more easily. Ultimately, the Brewstr team hopes that their invention might help to create a community of people who, like them, enjoy a cold brew.