Worth the money?

[Jon Walker]

So bizarre. This expensive machine appears to cater to the lager drinker who, in most cases, is not interested in craft.

WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery

Interested in getting into home brewing but put off by the complex, lengthy process? The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery (NZ$5,700; roughly $4,500) was made for you. By keeping the entire brewing process inside a single unit, the WilliamsWarn is able to carbonate the beer during the first day of fermentation, keep it the correct temperature throughout the process, remove sediment, clarify the beer, and keep it pressurized while you enjoy ice cold beer directly from the built-in tap. Time from start to drink? One week, or as much time as it will take to recover from the hangover caused by the last batch.

Would this be of any use if you wanted to make anything other than fizzy lager?
http://uncrate.com/stuff/williamswarn-personal-brewery/

[Jon Walker]

Hmmm...while they claim you can do other styles it certainly looks geared to lager and pale ale at best...at least according to the video on their own website;
http://www.williamswarn.com/

Though it does say this;
With this system we have an "Advanced Method" which in the US is known as ""Extract plus grains". I don't like that phrase because the title ignores the hops and other ingredients. We are an extract brewery and this method has huge flexibility for us to make all types of beer. Two of the great American beer gurus, Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer wrote a book in 2007 called "Brewing Classic Styles". It has 80 recipes all using extract plus grains. These guys wrote this book because they thought "extract brewing doesn't get the respect it deserves". You can make all those beers, the standard list in the BJCP Style Guidelines, in our machine. So not only light beers but hop monsters too. We will be promoting this method as the real fun part of this hobby with our unit but first we're launching with our Basic Method which is add ingredients and wait, just to get us going.

You can also make your own all-grain wort and add it. Our machine is focused on fermentation to consumption, with the secondary carbonation step eliminated, so you can add any wort you like.

So you can make hoppy, bitter, black, brown, estery, aromatic, phenolic or whatever-you-want-beers in this unit. The unit just takes the hassle out of it and does it right, without compromising what the yeast needs or the beer needs to make top notch beverages.

[icemachine]

This was discussed on the SOB forums a while back, consensus was nice machinery, but you can get a whole lot more kit for the money, so unless you've got money to burn, its not got a lot of appeal to the average homebrewer

[markaberrant]

What a load of bull.

[Ale's What Cures Ya]

Seems like a toy for someone with more money than taste.

[StephenRich]

My big beef with this thing is that its just an extract homebrew machine... of which you can get much simpler, and most likely just as effective ones for a fraction of the cost...