Most of us don’t follow Kickstarter, because there are only so many “roomy” jeans pitches and crappy iPhone wallet designs you can see before your sanity starts slipping. But it’s a compelling site in many, many ways, and one of the most compelling is to see what trends are arriving. And there’s one in particular that beer geeks and people who like good beer should know about.

Namely, the beer robot. Two projects, the Picobrew Zymatic and the BrewBot, were recently funded, and essentially, it takes brewing out of the realm of fussy chemistry and makes it as simple as making bread. While the two devices have different designs and different principles, they both have the same aim; making it simple for you to brew beer.

Everything is computerized and monitored with sensors, from the very beginning. The process of adding hops, yeast, and other items is done automatically; all you have to do is measure it out. Essentially, if you’ve got one of these things, access to a homebrew shop (or catalog) and a hose, you can start making your own beer within minutes of unpacking this thing.

Which, OK, is pretty cool, but the first thing you might be wondering is just how much making your own beer costs. As any homebrewer can tell you, making beer can be a glorious thing, but also an expensive, agonizing and quixotic endeavor. It’s very easy for a batch of beer to go off-kilter, or get skunked, or just taste terrible. Taking those problems out of the equation will, for now, run you about $1300 to $3000. So, yeah, these are, on a personal level, pretty expensive and will be the province of rich people with massive kitchens and frat houses with chemistry majors for a while.