As the son of a guy who loves making his own beer, I know firsthand how easy it is to get all poetic and lusty about the seeming alchemy that goes into brewing. It’s a careful and relatively exacting process that yields hot, brown, smelly water—then you put it in special containers, leave it alone for a few weeks, and return to find that it has transubstantiated into beer.
That’s why brewing “purists” are so miffed with a company called PicoBrew. The company’s first product, the Zymatic, purportedly takes the “magic” out of brewing by bringing Internet-enabled electronics into the process. It carefully monitors all aspects of brewing to ensure optimal temperature, boiling time, and the like.
The company’s latest product is aimed at those more interested in just drinking beer. It’s a smart kegerator and fermenter called KegSmarts, and it’s currently raising money on Kickstarter.
KegSmarts will display all kinds of pertinent information about the beer you’re drinking via its small display above the tap (or taps if you spring for the two-tap model). It even has a social mapping functionality that will let you find nearby craft beers that you might want to try.
This is a gadget for true beer nerds who love to know all the details of what they’re drinking—ABV, where your beer was brewed, the works. So drink up! A single-tap KegSmarts is yours for a $900 pledge.
Photo via PicoBrew/Kickstarter