Because one of my hobbies is brewing beer, I often find myself with a lot of spent grain. Bigger breweries often use it to feed livestock but ultimately, the value of the grain will never be at the level that it was before the brewing process.

In order to reuse this waste and add value, it can be fermented, creating new products. One of these products is miso. Miso is an amino-paste that is often used in Asian cuisine to add an umami (savouriness) taste to food. 

Miso is traditionally created by inoculating soy beans and salt with aspergillus oryzae, better known as Koji. Koji is a mold excretes enzymes that break down proteins and starches, transforming them into amino acids and sugars, which lead to savoury and sweet flavors. 

Koji needs a stable environment, with a constant temperature and humidity. In order to do so, I am working on an incubator to grow this mold to serve as a basis for products such as miso.

To the right, you can see the first hardware schematic. It contains an Arduino microcontroller that measures the temperature and humidity and drives an SSR through PID to keep it in a constant state. 

Because this is an ongoing project I can’t share more than what I’ve written but if you want to know more, please send me an email so we can talk about it!