Home-brew startup Minibrew raises $2.8 million to put a keg in your kitchen

Thomas McMullan Read more May 24, 2017

It looks like a coffee machine, but those aren’t beans in Minibrew’s portable fermenter. Established by a pair of Dutch entrepreneurs, the Minibrew is an automated, all-in-one beer-maker, and the company has just raised $2.8 million (£2.2 million) for its efforts to put wheat, yeast and hops in your home.

Home-brew startup Minibrew raises $2.8 million to put a keg in your kitchen

As Techcrunch reports, Minibrew has secured the seed funding following a successful $350,000 (£270,000) crowdfunding campaign. The Minibrew itself is a personal brewer, apparently covering the process from raw ingredients to bottling the final product. It also doubles up as a portable keg, so you can turn up at a party with homemade offerings before boring everyone to death by talking about hops.

“In terms of brewing machines that claim to deliver beer, such as ‘fully automated home brewery’ they both forget a critical step: fermenting,” co-founder Bart van de Kooij told the site.

“Although the others have a fermentation process, it is manual and not automatic as promoted. This might work for some who have knowledge and want to play with fermentation time and carbonation levels, but the brew quality will ultimately suffer in flavour and users will not be able to reproduce the same brew again.”

While home brewing has been around for yonks, the Minibrew adds a layer of automation to the process – because who wants to use craftsmanship for making craft beer? There’s a connected app, because of course there is, that lets you control your brewer from afar. The Minibrew can also apparently pop out a variety of different beer types, including wheat and IPA.

Minibrew is planning to ship in Q1 2018, and has cut its preorder prices from €1,332 (£1,148) to €999 (£861). Or you could save your money for the pub – they have a pool table there.