On 11/23/2014 1:00 AM, Travis McGee wrote:
> 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.”

The source for that article was
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/bu...om-an-app.html