PARCHED | RISE OF THE MACHINES

By Stephen Pulvirent

Drinking is hard work.

There’s all that mixing, bottle-opening, and pouring. Luckily, the distance between us and a blissful Jetsons-like future of automated imbibing is quickly closing. Whether you want a robot to mix you a Manhattan when you get home from that grueling desk job or a Japanese-invented contraption to sculpt the perfect ice sphere for your rare whisky, it’s all doable. Some of these inventions can be in your kitchen tomorrow, while others require a little waiting. Either way, the future of inebriation is here.

Automatic Cocktail Maker: Somabar

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The Somabar is a robotic bartender that actually looks good on your counter.

Of the many cocktail mixing machines out there—yeah, there are a bunch, surprisingly not all in Skymall or the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog—Somabar is the only one I’d want to surround with my house guests. Six pods hold your spirits and mixers, and the entire contraption is controlled with an app on your phone or tablet. Drinks are fully mixed and chilled in the Somabar before being dispensed into the proper cocktail glass. There’s even a special bitters infuser to keep your cocktail snob friends from sneering. $429 pre-order

Home Brew Made Easy: PicoBrew Zymatic

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Home brewing is a mess, unless you’ve got something like this.

Maybe you’re not much of a cocktail person and you’re looking for a new summer beer to drink instead. With the PicoBrew Zymatic, you can make your own. The self-contained brewing machine eliminates the clumsy mix of kettles, tubes, and fermenters that you traditionally need to home brew. It handles whole hops and malt, so you’re not limited to extracts and concentrates, either. Best part: You can program it with recipes from the Web and take all the credit when your friends love the suds. $1,999

Carbonate Everything: Sodastream Mix

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Instead of blowing up your Sodastream trying to carbonate a bottle of wine, just get the Mix.

If you own a Sodastream, you’ve definitely played the “let me see if I can carbonate that” game—and then blown up your machine. (Don’t lie: been there, done that, and no, the wine stains didn’t come out.) Luckily the engineers at Sodastream are as bubble-obsessed as you. Behold, the Mix. With a beautiful touch interface, the Mix lets you program the on-demand carbonator to put just the right amount of fizz into whatever you want to carbonate. Turn a bottle of white wine into makeshift Champagne or a Martini into, well, a sparkling Martini. Let the fun begin. Pre-orders starting soon

See the rest at Bloomberg Business