( Ars Technica ) -- Home-brewers who may have dreamt about harnessing the power of Arduino to automate their process may find something to envy in the PicoBrew Zymatic , a project posted to Kickstarter Monday . The machine 's makers purport to automate the process of home-brewing from beginning to end ; owners simply add their ingredients and come back in a while to processed beer and an easy clean-up solution . Brothers Jim and Bill Mitchell , the latter a former Microsoft executive , constructed the first prototype in 2010 using , among other things , an Arduino controller and a custom heating loop . The two teamed up with Microsoft software architect Avi Geiger in the fall of 2011 . More recent versions of the PicoBrew machine moved to custom AMTEGA controller boards and a number of custom parts , some rendered by Geiger himself . With the level of specificity provided by the PicoBrew , the founders state that users should be able to turn out recipes `` precisely on spec . '' The machine can also import BeerXML-formatted recipes and translate and scale them to the PicoBrew 's setup . The machine is sort of an odd meeting ground between the act of homesteading and using science and commercial techniques on a consumer level . The founders cite the amount of work and hands-on time home-brewing requires , although that 's part of the charm for some enthusiasts . At $ 1,300 , it 's not really for the casual home-brewer . The PicoBrew has more potential clients in commercial craft breweries . One source in the Kickstarter video , Matt Linecum of Fremont brewery , notes that the machine could be used for quickly testing the quality of ingredients before committing to their use in a full batch . COPYRIGHT 2011 ARSTECHNICA.COM .
A Kickstarter campaign seeks to automate the small - scale beer creation process . The PicoBrew Zymatic automates some steps of brewing , but it 's not cheap . The user can import ingredients and add them to the PicoBrew 's recipe .