From a ceiling covered in beer to the world's smartest home fermentation platform.
Zhang Shu had been homebrewing for years — the kind of obsessive hobbyist who read fermentation science in his spare time and recorded hydrometer readings like other people collect receipts.
One afternoon, a batch got away from him. Pressure built. The vessel gave.
Beer hit the ceiling.
He cleaned it up, ordered more ingredients, and started again.
That stubbornness is why iGulu exists.
Not because craft beer is a good business. Because Zhang Shu couldn't stop thinking about why something as natural and ancient as fermentation — humans have been doing this for 10,000 years — still required so much specialized knowledge, so much failure, and so much mess just to make one good glass of something you made yourself.
The craft beer revolution proved something: people don't just want to consume better. They want to make better.
But Zhang Shu noticed something else when friends and family came over. His wife wanted kombucha. His parents wanted yogurt. His neighbor had started asking about mead.
Nobody at the table wanted the same thing. And none of them had the time, space, or expertise for traditional home fermentation.
The problem wasn't beer. The problem was that the means of fermentation had never been designed for how people actually live.
iGulu was built to fix that.
In 2016, we launched on Kickstarter as ArtBrew — a fully automated home craft beer system that could brew, cool, and dispense without a brewing degree.
The world noticed.
The iGulu S1 Kickstarter campaign attracted 1,103 backers and raised $472,252 — 47 times our funding goal. Not because we marketed well. Because we solved a real problem, and the people who had that problem recognized it immediately.
Reviewers put it better than we could:
"Like a bread machine, but for beer." — The Gadgeteer
TechRadar's reviewer handed his father the first pour. His dad took a sip and said: "That tastes alright."
That sentence is worth more to us than any award.
(Though we've won a few of those too: CES Innovation Award 2017. Red Dot Design Award 2024. Fortune Best New Design 2024. Rolling Stone's CES pick.)
iGulu is not a beer machine. It is a smart home fermentation platform.
Every iGulu machine ferments, temperature-controls, and carbonates — automatically. Beer, yes. But also mead, wine, cider, hard kombucha, sparkling water, yogurt, and kefir.
The F1 ($749) is for the enthusiast who wants mastery: compressor cooling, full touchscreen, built-in CO2 system, RFID ingredient recognition, and Master Mode for fully custom recipes.
The S1 ($549) is for everyone else: the person who wants great homemade drinks without a learning curve.
Both machines connect to the iGulu ecosystem — curated ingredient kits delivered monthly, a growing library of 500+ recipes, and a community of fermenters around the world.
Our most loyal users have a phrase for what iGulu has given them: beverage independence.
They start the morning with fresh kefir. They pour a glass of kombucha at lunch. On weekends, they open a cold one they brewed themselves three weeks ago.
They don't think of iGulu as an appliance. They think of it as the means of production for their own health and joy — sitting quietly on their counter, running batches, making the thing they actually want to drink.
That's what we set out to build in 2016. That's what we're still building.
iGulu is for people who believe the best version of the things you love should be made by you.
Start brewing. Start fermenting. Start with iGulu.
