Don’t like the cider at the local grocery store? Brew your own!

Photo credit: Connie Ma .

Wouldn’t it be great if you could survive the blistering summer months with a glass of cold cider always by your side?

Not one that you’ll have to drag yourself down to the local 7/11 for, but a tasty concoction that’s possible to brew in your own home.

Launching today on Kickstarter is Alchema.

The startup’s gizmo turns fruits into craft cider with ingredients such as sugar, water, and yeast. Typically, the process takes two weeks but can vary slightly based on choice of fruits and custom settings such as alcohol content and volume.

“Almost two million Americans have attempted to homebrew, but it usually turns out disappointing in terms of flavor or complexity to use,” explains Oscar Chang, CEO of Alchema.

“We want to make homebrewing easy and fun for everyone to create and share over and over.”

The device is available on Kickstarter with an early bird pledge of US$299 and will retail for US$499 when it eventually hits stores. But early backers will have to wait until September 2017 to get their hands on the device.

Oscar, who’s a former candidate for a Phd in electrical engineering, says Alchema is very simple to set up and start using.

Before the fermentation process begins, Alchema automatically sanitizes the container. This is important because if the container isn’t fully sanitized and sealed, the cider will get contaminated and produce a brew that’s not fit for consumption.

Sanitization is also one of the major factors why it’s so difficult to homebrew, he explains. Alchema uses an in-built medical grade LED light to resolve the issue.

After this process, users are prompted to choose a recipe from the Alchema app and add ingredients with the product’s built-in weight sensors. That’s it.

The container will keep monitoring the fermentation procedure and communicate with the user via its app to let them know when a batch is ready.