People have brewed beer for millennia, including in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, but it's never been more fashionable than during this century. Craft breweries have been popping up across Melbourne lately, from Collingwood to Cheltenham, often because of the owners' success with home-brewing.

It's a fairly easy process that essentially involves fermenting water, yeast and a prepared grain product. I tried it with the low-tech Coopers DIY Beer Brew Kit and BrewArt's BeerDroid, a smart, mains-powered machine whose greatest advantage is self-regulating the mix's temperature during primary fermentation. Keeping your brew within specific temperature ranges during this week-long process is crucial, so being reassured by BrewArt's app that all's well makes home-brewing a breeze.

Both set-ups can be used with their respective ranges of prepared ingredient packs to make numerous beer styles, and are also supported by plenty of online instructional videos – though it was strangely difficult to find out which of the various BrewArt packets and pouches should be added at each point in the process.

BrewArt creates considerable waste unsuitable for kerbside recycling (especially if decanting into kegs with single-use plastic liners, which are used in the associated BrewFlo mini pub-style dispenser, rather than decanting into reusable bottles).