Meet The Alchema Home Cider Maker

This new Wi-Fi-equipped gadget can turn fruit into alcohol

Asking for a friend: Wouldn't it be great if you could put grapes into a slow cooker and have them magically turn into wine?

Turns out someone already has a genius answer to this question. Meet the Alchema home brew gadget, an as-of-now fully pledged Kickstarter project that takes fresh fruit and turns it into craft cider, which you can show off to all your friends.

The idea makes sense, as fruit is sugar and sugar is alcohol. Plus, it's as simple as making coffee, but instead the end result is your own blend of craft cider. And don't think that you need any special brewing know-how. You start by simply selecting a recipe from the app, like mead, orange cider or pomegranate cider. Then it's just like making Kool-Aid: Follow the directions and add fruit, sugar, water and the yeast, which kicks off the fermentation. One to two weeks later, you're ready to roll.

A Wi-Fi connection keeps you up to date on how your brew is coming along and will send you a push notification when the brew is ready. There's also a special sanitization system that helps keep your batch from getting contaminated—a problem that often causes homebrewing to go awry.

Bemoan modern technology all you want, but something that uses Wi-Fi to turn fruit into alcohol is technology at its finest.