Top of the hops!

In the mood for some DIY? A surge in clever brewing tech means it’s never been easier, or more fun, to make your own craft beers at home

PicoBrew Pico

No longer does home brewing have to involve spending hours in a shed, presiding over a small city of fermenting vats. As sleek and stylish as a luxury coffee machine, the PicoBrew Pico is an automated microbrewery that sits neatly on your kitchen worktop. Simply insert a PicoPak (there are dozens of these grain-and-hops formulas available, from award-winning breweries around the world, or you can rustle up your own recipes), select your preferred alcohol content, hit Brew and within two hours the accompanying barrel will be full of sterile but unfermented ale. Then all you do is add yeast, then wait a few days (monitoring your beer’s progress via your smart device) before carbonating it and you’ll have five litres of beery goodness with which to wow your beer-swilling buddies. $399 (£293), picobrew.com

The Oak Bottle

It’s not very often that we feature gadgets made out of wood, but The Oak Bottle was just too ingenious to leave out. Claiming to be the first of its kind in the world, it’s a vessel made from American white oak that promises to infuse any beer, cocktail, wine or whiskey poured inside it with that delicious oak-aged flavour. You won’t have to sit around for months getting parched either, as the device accelerates the ageing process to a much more bearable 48 hours. In taste tests, the cheapest wines and whiskeys ‘aged’ in The Oak Bottle were given a higher rating than the most expensive options. There’s no reason why your beer can’t be similarly enhanced. $89.95 (£67), oakbottle.com

Pilsner Urquell Virtual Brewery Tour

As with anything, the best way to master the art of beermaking is to watch the experts going about their business. And, thanks to the wonder of VR, you can do so without having to leave your living room. The Pilsner Urquell Virtual Brewery Tour, for the Oculus Rift, transports you to the company’s premises in Plzen, Czech Republic, for a unique guided tour that’s as educational as it is immersive. Explore their underground maturation cellars, take a front-row seat for their Saaz hop harvest, scoop Moravian barley in the malthouse, and meet the brewery’s resident Beermaster. Obviously you can’t sample the beer – VR’s not that advanced yet – but you’ll absorb so many tips and tricks you’ll soon be making your own beverages. £Free, oculus.com

The Tilt

If you’re a purist who baulks at the idea of having an automated machine do all of the brewing for you, and prefer to stick with the good old-fashioned DIY method, there’s nothing wrong with that… But you could let tech take a bit of the weight off your shoulders. The Tilt is an intelligent, compact device that does just that. How? It accurately reads your beer’s gravity and temperature levels while it’s fermenting, before sending them to your smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. By doing this The Tilt saves you the bother of having to keep lifting the lid to check the progress of your ale, which doesn’t do it much good anyway. Don’t worry, we won’t tell your mates you cheated. $135 (£100), tilthydrometer.com

MiniBrew

Another machine that can produce pubquality craft beer with minimal effort on your part, the MiniBrew gives you the freedom (via an app) to create your own bespoke beer recipes. If you’re feeling unadventurous, you can also select from a wide variety of concoctions tried and trusted by Master Brewers. Once you’ve decided upon your ingredients – go easy on the chilli sauce, okay? – they’ll be delivered direct to your door. Then all you have to do is chuck your various bits and bobs into the MiniBrew, hit the Start button on the app, and away you go – literally, as the software does the rest of the work for you. The MiniBrew doesn’t come cheap, but being able to kick back while a robot bartender pours a beer created by you is priceless. €999 (£880), minibrew.io

The Grainfather

One of the first all-in-one systems to hit the market, the crowdfunded Grainfather – launched by New Zealand company Bevie in 2014 – rocks an aesthetic that will appeal more to the traditional home brewer. But while it’s not as bijou as its rivals in this feature, it holds its own both in terms of the beer it produces and the time it takes to deliver. In fact, it’ll brew from grain in as little as four hours, with an included wort chiller cooling your batch in a physics-defying 20 minutes. And it gets extra gold stars for ease of use, thanks to a Connect controller that enables you to type in your commands, and monitor the Grainfather’s progress, via an app on your smart device. £680, grainfather.com

Fizzics Waytap

Whether your drink of choice is Hofmeister or Hoegaarden, you’ll surely agree that it tastes much better coming straight from a tap than it does from a dusty bottle or can. That’s why there should be a place in your kitchen for the cleverly named Fizzics Waytap. Yes, it looks a bit like a Mr Whippy dispenser, but this affordable gadget rocks some pretty rad tech. Once you’ve inserted your bottle or can into the slender pipe, a tug of the lever kickstarts a sonication process, whereby sound waves help to turn the beer’s natural carbonation into what the company has trademarked MicroFoam. The result is a markedly improved flavour and mouthfeel. And yes, you deserve that after a long day in the office. £71, fizzics.com