Craft beer brewing is big business in 2015, and the success of these beers in the commercial space has seen a rising interest in home brewing.

If you’ve ever tried brewing beer before you know how fussy it can be; you need to get your measurements right, watch the temperatures, and try to time the best time to bottle…and that’s just some of the steps with a basic lager.

But what if you could bring the internet of things to brewing beer in an all over system that promises to make your home brewing an easier, and in theory a more palatable success.

That’s where the Brewie comes in.

Billed as the world’s first fully automated home-brewery, the system provides “fully automated brewing …with [a] compact design. Perfect for beginners and experts.”

Compact isn’t a correct description: it’s a large metal machine measuring 21.2 inches tall by 12.8 inches deep and 17.7 inches wide, weighing 55 pounds. On the inside there are chambers for water, beer ingredients and yeast.  On the outside there’s a 4.3” touchscreen that sports over 200 beer recipes, and allows you to tweak the various aspects if you’re game enough to experiment.

The ingredients are shipped prepackaged from the company and come with an RFID card that connects with the machine so it knows what beer you’re brewing, automatically adjusting settings to suit the brew. Water is also automatically added, and the whole process is basically throw them in the machine and go; normal beer brewing involves a range of additional steps.

If you’re a pedant when it comes to getting your beer making right and you want to keep in touch at any time, anywhere with what your brew is currently doing, the machine connects to Wifi and you can access the stats and make adjustments if required by a Brewie app available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Internet connected brewing comes at a price

People do take their beer brewing seriously, and they’d want to as Brewie is currently available on pre-sale $1,599 for the beginners package, $2,299 for the professional package and $4,499 for the “Unique Skin” professional package. None come with any starter ingredients, and postage varies from between $150-$200 depending on where you live.

A standard, non internet enabled brewing kit retails for $50-$100 and would usually include a starter pack of ingredients to get you going.

The third drink is the charm though; the company does point out that you’ll save some serious money over buying craft beer, with an average 330ml drink costing 23cents, which depending on where you live is a small saving or a seriously large one. But likewise, you’d have to consume a rather large amount of beer over a significant time frame to break even on your outlay; it’s not recommend to those concerned about alcoholism.

Despite the price Brewie is rather clever, and it would seem to be a great idea for those who are interested in brewing beer, but don’t have the time, nor skills to brew beer in a more traditional, non-interconnected way.

Brewie has raised $129,000 at the time of writing on Kickstarter and is due to be shipped in September 2015. The presale and Kickstarter offering ends January 31st.