A Personal Beer Brewery That Spouts Pro-Quality Suds In A Week

I'm pretty sure that fermentation takes about 2 weeks, not 1. Everything I have read on the topic says the a single week for most beers is just not long enough. I wonder how they account for this.

If you don't want to put in the effort to learn how to actually brew/homebrew, it would be MUCH better for you to spend the $5,000 on professionally brewed beer.

There is no "fix it an forget it" approach to brewing. It is hard to make great beer, and there are many learning lessons along the way. If you are not willing to put in the effort and encounter some setbacks, don't bother. I assure you that if you buy this apparatus, you will be destined to making mediocre beers for the rest of your life.

As for the throughput time, 1 week is probably impractical for most situations. There are many factors that determine how long yeast ferments (i.e. temperature, yeast strain, O2 ppm, yeast cell count, wort gravity, etc.). There is also harm in rushing the process such as underattenuation (beer doesn't ferment all the way and is sickly sweet), diacetyl (think buttered popcorn) and acetaldehyde (green apple flavor).

Do yourself a favor and buy John Palmer's book "How to Brew" and then decide for yourself if this is a hobby that you actually want to pursue.

$5,000?

Now that is a massive waste money.

Do some research (buy a lot of 6 packs of beer), figure out what you love, and buy that. And you get immediate gratification.

I've been homebrewing for years now, and it is hardly "painstaking." There are many different methods for brewing, but it really comes down to All-grain or Extract brewing. All-grain does take a bit of time and finesse and the rewards are beers that can truly be considered "yours" since you control the whole process, but for the casual brewer (and drinker) extract brewing is fantastic. I tell the people that I teach that brewing five gallons of an extract (about 45 12oz bottles) takes 4-5 hours of their lives spread over 2 months.

Generally, the initial brew takes 2-3 hours of an afternoon, the fermentation, depending on your yeast strain (ales are quickest), can take as long as a week and as quick as 24-hours, then you've got transferring to get the beer off the dead yeast (maybe an hour of time), another few weeks of clarifying in secondary fermentation, and then bottling (which takes about an hour or two). The bottles sit for a couple weeks to a month and you've got your own beer. If you can make tea, you can make beer. The only technical part of brewing where you have to be careful is sanitation, but once you've done that a couple of times, it becomes second nature.

It'll cost you about $200 in initial spending and, depending on your area and the beers you choose to brew (that's right, the style YOU want when YOU want it), you could spend from $30-50 per batch for ingredients. Unless you prefer Pabst or Hamm's, you spend less in the long run brewing yourself.

Or, you can buy what someone else tells you to drink.

I've been brewing for only two short years and have thoroughly enjoyed it, learned a great deal about beer, and have brewed some very good quality suds. I enjoy every step and it certainly is not painstaking. I can't imagine shelling out $5,000 for this "quickie" machine.

I too have been home brewing for a very long time. It's a pleasurable hobby with a wonderful payoff...but this we already know.

My questions are:
If this process only warms the sugars and water to 70 degrees, then how are the sugars fully fermented?
Unless a hop infused malt is used, how are the flavors extracted from hops?

Even when using a Malt Extract or Dried Malt Extract, wort must be cooked to a rolling boil before the malt sugars start to flourish and release the molecular structure of sugars into the liquid(wort). Adding processed or natural sugars to the boil (including fructose, sucrose or glucose) can enhance the flavor and alcohol content, but again they must be boiled. Additionally, proteins are stabilized and naturally occurring enzymes are denatured during the boil. Without cooking, you'll end up with sugar water a glob of unused yeast and very little alcohol production.

The suggestion that the CO2 is captured and recycled so the brew is fermented under pressure also troubles me. Scientifically, this makes very little sense. A pure CO2 environment may enhance carbonation, but this is hardly pure. Capturing the byproduct CO2 will actually slow fermentation and it will taint the flavor of the final product....BEER.

On the matter of flavoring, of course dry hopping might be an option here, but they don't mention hops at all.

So I contacted WilliamsWarn (in Australia) by e-mail..it seems they're about a year from production, aren't looking for investors or distributors and are a little less informed than one might hope. Hmmm....I'll keep my stainless mash tun, brew kettle and conical fermenter a while longer, thanks.