Java: Readers, Writers, Buffers and Streams - seems like a lot to deal with

StreamReaderHelper.java

package us.greg;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.io.Writer;

public class StreamReaderHelper {

	/*
	 * this is my helper function
	 */
	public static String readStream(InputStream is) throws IOException {
		int n = is.available();
		char[] buffer = new char[n];
		Reader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8"));
		Writer writer = new StringWriter();
		while ((n = reader.read(buffer, 0, n)) != -1) {
			writer.write(buffer, 0, n);
		}
		return writer.toString();
	}
}