Brewing Your Own Beer, With Help From an App

By CLAIRE MARTINNOV. 22, 2014

Two years ago, craft beers were scarce in the pubs of Northern Ireland.
The taps were dominated instead by megabrands like Guinness, Harp and
Heineken.

“Even basic I.P.A.s were very rare in the region,” recalls Chris
McClelland, who says the situation is slowly improving. “Sometimes you
could get them, but you spent a lot of money. We were very constrained
in what we drank.”

Mr. McClelland was the founder of a Belfast-based product design company
called Cargo. He and three of his colleagues were so frustrated by the
dearth of craft beers in town that they began experimenting with making
their own, and even toyed with the idea of starting a brewery. But
instead, they invented a machine that makes it easier for home brewers,
bars, restaurants and even commercial breweries to make small batches of
craft beer using their own ingredients and recipes.

Last year, Mr. McClelland and the group decided to focus exclusively on
beer and founded a company called Brewbot. Its main product is a
stainless-steel-and-wood brewing machine that’s 4 feet wide, 4 feet tall
and 2 feet deep, and that produces five-gallon batches of beer. It can
be stowed in a garage or even in a large kitchen.

For individuals, it’s a beer equivalent of a home-brewed coffee machine,
yet it still encourages creativity and experimentation. For businesses,
it’s a way to try new beers without the expense of enormous production runs.

Customers can devise their own recipes, but also have access to recipes
the company has created or collected from breweries around the world,
including the Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, Calif., the
Tiny Rebel Brewing Company in Wales and Galway Bay Brewery in Ireland.

The machines are manufactured in Northern Ireland and will be delivered
to customers starting in early 2015. The company says it has received
about 80 preorders at a price of $2,300 to $4,200; the eventual retail
price has not yet been set.

Brewbot’s story illustrates the challenges and benefits of being a
newcomer in a well-established industry.

According to Joseph B. Lassiter, a professor at the Harvard Business
School and faculty chairman of the Harvard Innovation Lab, it’s never a
good idea for an entrepreneur to enter an industry completely cold.

“You hear people make statements like ‘Because I had absolutely no
experience in the business, I could reinvent it,’ ” he says. “In
general, that’s a really stupid position.” Rather, it’s important “to
have enough knowledge of the current system to know how to outcompete it.”

In the case of Brewbot, the co-founders were experienced technologists.
Mr. McClelland, the chief executive, had previously founded a smartphone
app company. Reflecting that expertise, the machine has sensors that
collect data, such as the temperature of the water in the vessel. It
sends that information to a smartphone app that lets the brewer know
when it’s time for the next step — adding hops, for instance. The
machine is also connected to the Internet, allowing it to communicate
with other Brewbots, and letting brewers swap and collaborate on recipes
via a smartphone app.

A Seattle-based competitor, PicoBrew, which makes a countertop brewing
machine called the PicoBrew Zymatic, similarly was founded by a group of
home-brewing enthusiasts, two of whom had spent their careers in the
tech industry. Their machine brews 2.5 gallons of beer per batch; the
retail price is $1,699.

During their time experimenting with home brewing, Brewbot’s founders
learned a lot more about beer, including why people buy it, how they
drink it and how it’s made.

The Brewbot team members had cobbled together a production kit using
plastic buckets and kettles, and, like many home brewers, fumbled their
way through their first few batches, calling on friends for advice and
obsessing over the temperature of the ingredients.

“It was a lot of monitoring and babysitting,” Mr. McClelland says of the
process. “We were setting aside five hours to brew a batch of beer, but
it was taking nine hours. It was a lot of effort to achieve one batch of
beer.” And they had no idea how it would taste.

Luckily, they liked it. So did the friends and relatives they shared it
with as they made more batches.

Craft brews are meant to be consumed soon after they’re made. Shipping
them long distances can compromise flavor and freshness, so many brewers
don’t do it. And when they do, heavy taxes on beer can make it expensive
to buy.

But by deconstructing the brewing process and creating a network where
brewers can share recipes, Brewbot is allowing individuals and breweries
to make beers they may not be able to buy at home. (To increase their
revenue stream beyond selling a single, relatively expensive device,
Brewbot also sells the hops, barley and yeast that go into the beer.)

Brewbot’s founders and investors see value in creating a community
around small-batch brewing.

“You pull people into this ecosystem and hold onto them and engage them
very deeply,” says Jason Seats, a managing director of the start-up
accelerator Techstars, which invested in Brewbot. “You kind of own that
group’s loyalty as long as you don’t betray their trust,” Mr. Seats
says, adding that figuring out how to monetize the relationship isn’t
the priority.

Brewbot has raised $1.5 million in financing and plans to open a second
office in the San Francisco Bay Area next year.

Mr. Seats and Mr. McClelland both say they see the business as having
the potential to “democratize” brewing. Mr. Seats imagines “all these
different millions of variations, people trying different things,
innovating their own recipes and discovering really interesting recipes
and then being able to immediately syndicate those to other corners of
the world.” He adds: “That’s a really exciting concept. And that’s what
that makes us megabig in terms of potential.”