Turn Your Old Fruit Into Booze With This New Gadget

Thrillist

Just as one man's trash is another man's treasure, one dude's old fruit can end up being another dude's happy hour. Alchema is a new countertop device that ferments fruit into delicious homebrewed craft cider -- and it's as easy to use as a coffee machine. 

Currently making waves on Kickstarter (it made its funding in record time) and at the nerdtastic tech expo CES, the Alchema makes homemade cider a simple process. While synched with your smartphone, it works in conjunction with an app that guides you along the normally tenuous homebrewing process. It comes pre-loaded with recipes to accommodate a wide variety of fruits from apples to pineapples to raspberries. Or, you can go rogue and make your own (maybe a batch of lychee-cranberry-starfruit cider is in your future).

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Alchema/Youtube

The prep time literally takes minutes, and really, all the hard work is done by the machine. You just have to sit back and wait for your smartphone to buzz. The only drawback here is that most ciders take one to two weeks to complete.

Still, during this time the machine just literally sits there like a Crock-Pot, so all you have to do is go ahead and live your (potentially sad and cider-less) life.

Right now, the easiest and quickest way to score an Alchema is to donate $329 to its Kickstarter project: That will land you a machine when they launch in July 2017. That gives you approximately six months to start a collection of old fruit.

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Wil Fulton is a staff writer for Thrillist. He actually blames Gwyneth Paltrow for most of the world's problems. Follow him @wilfulton.