The All-in-One Personal Brewery

Invented by New Zealanders Ian Williams and Anders Warn, the WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery makes homebrewing very simple. You simply add ingredients, boil, add yeast and wait for beer. How is this system different? Everything happens in one machine. The WilliamsWarn comprises of a brewing tank, refrigeration system and a dashboard panel to control the system.

This truly is a personal brewery. In a normal homebrew setup, you boil your wort, transfer it to a fermenter, then transfer it again to bottles or kegs, and finally you carbonate the beer. This mini brewery never transfer the beer.

There are several advantages to not transferring your beer. First you won’t expose your beer to oxygen or infections. Every time you transfer your beer, you run the risk of ruining your beer. Second the WilliamsWarn system is a closed system which will help your beer last longer. According to their site, “The oxygen pickup in this system is the lowest in the world as we have no beer transfers and it is oxygen pickup during beer transfers that ages beer.” Third, since the beer is fermented under pressure and never transferred, you do not need to carbonate the beer later. The system keeps the CO2 from carbonation in the beer. They claim you can go from wort to glass after 7 days.

The downside to the system is it is a bit spendy. The price is $4500 ($5600 NZ). The price and functionality may seem to be better suited towards a small pub than a homebrewer, although I’ve seen many systems like the B3 sculptures which can easily be more expensive. Your budget mileage may vary.

I think I’d also like to see an option to transfer the beer directly to keg. It looks like the beer stays in the system until it’s empty. The serving tap for the beer is on the side of the brewery. It would be nice to be able to connect the system to an external keg, and transfer the finished beer under pressure.

So what do you think? What changes would you make to it?