home brewery

Last week I tried out the new WilliamsWarn home brew system http://www.williamswarn.com/ which is a brilliant piece of Kiwi ingenuity.
Ian Williams, the designer, let me "borrow" it for a week to put down a brew. I didn't physically borrow it as the brew was prepared and fermented on his premises on Great South Road - after all he wouldn't want an amateur like me lugging his $6000 baby all over Auckland.
But Ian then delivered the 20L batch to our workplace on Friday evening where the cask was drunk dry in short time. Here's a pic courtesy of @richardboock http://yfrog.com/hsbaqtuj
The brilliance of the WilliamsWarn is that you can ferment and cask the beer in the same vessel, as Ian has developed some amazing gadgets which a) clear the yeast sediment b) clarify the wort without opening the lid c) keep the wort under constant pressure and temperature (to best suit the yeast) and d) take the fresh beer from the fermenter/barrel via and ingenious pump system so you can drink the equivalent of tap beer straight from the fermenter as it were. You can also carbonate to your desired level.
It's a pretty little appliance actually (though many people were surprised by how big it was!).
It's also expensive but Ian hopes that he if can sell a few in North America and Europe, the price will come down, particularly for Kiwi brewers.
At the current price it's not necessarily an ideal home brew system for a bloke on his own. Also, the idea is that the beer is supposed to be drunk fresh, although it will keep for a number of days, and the temptation of having 20L of beer chilled and on tap in your own home could be a disaster.
But you can bottle from it if you want (without the worry of calculating priming sugar/yeast or sedimentation).
It would be an ideal machine for a sports club or a big flat, or university dorm - where you can lay down a brew on Sunday and drink it the following Saturday night! It's a quick clean and repeat.
Twenty litres does disappear pretty fast with a few people around. At our workplace, it was quaffed  quickly (media people are a sucker for a free drink). Ian and I went for a blond ale with a late infusion of Riwaka hops and it was an easy drinking brew - just perfect for the large number of women in our building because it wasn't too hoppy and not too carbonated. It had hints of passionfruit and citrus and I got a light bubblegum whiff which I quite liked.
The real advantage of this machine (if you can afford it) is the commercial quality of the brew. It's super clear, with no off flavours that you often get from home brew. Because the entire machine is pasteurised before you start, there's no risk of infection and the temperature/carbonation control means everything that can usually go wrong doesn't.
Ian has some kits for making an array of brews but if you wanted to, you could do your own all-grain mash and then transfer the cooled wort to the WilliamsWarn.
In my dreams I'd have a microbrewery (more a nanobrewery) with half a dozen of these things lining the back wall with an array of brews on tap and another half dozen out the back brewing next week's batches.