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Ask HN: What are the hottest startups related to beer / brewing?

44 points| caiohdf | 9 years ago

I am a tech entrepreneur and I live among apps and tech stuff but I'd love to discuss the what is going on the beer and brewing startup environment of these days.

What are the innovations in this market, products related and what the big and also the small craft breweries are doing to innovate ?

55 comments

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[+] dagw|9 years ago|reply
Mikkeller, who know a thing or two about brewing, seem to be making a big push into non-or-low alcoholic beers that actually taste interesting. And speaking personally I'd love to see more things happening in this front. As an old old man (ie past 35) who cannot drink like he did in his youth I'd love to go to the pub on a Wednesday, have 6 pints of varied and interesting beers and still be at work and ready to go the next morning.
[+] hood_syntax|9 years ago|reply
Hey, I love Mikkeller (the Brunch Weasel stout was fantastic), but I just wanted to let you know they're not the only brewery doing low alcohol (note: personal reference) beers! Session beers are becoming more popular for just the reasons you describe, and although they may or may not fit your criteria for being low alcohol, the trend is there. I'd keep your eye out, there's definitely some exciting things developing on that front.
[+] themartorana|9 years ago|reply
As an also-over-35, I don't think it's just the alcohol. (Feel free to slap me down with science.) A beer hangover is now more severe than an equivalent-amount-of-alcohol hangover from say, vodka.
[+] mstade|9 years ago|reply
This! I don't like soda, and I don't drink alcohol since a few months while physically preparing for a swimrun event, but still would like a decent drink when going out to dinner or the likes. Surprisingly, the non-to-low alcoholic beers available these days are pretty good. Mikkeller as you mention are pushing innovation in this area, but also Brewdog and some local micro breweries as well. There are plenty of times I've wanted a beer, but not wanted the alcohol, so I firmly welcome the innovations in this space.
[+] bdalgaard|9 years ago|reply
I just heard a story on NPR about a startup in Boston called Purpose Energy turning waste water from a brewery (Magic Hat brewing) and turning it into usable energy (methane). There are other efforts to use brewing waste more environmentally/economically in permaculture [1], but this is the first I'd heard of them using it to create energy.

Here is the full story.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-14/massachusetts-pushes-b...

The company is only a small part of the story on clean energy startups and the company doesn't just work with breweries, so it is only slightly related to the original question. Still, it sounds like this is a big problem for breweries to deal with and there is some innovation happening around it.

[1] http://plantchicago.org/

[+] jmspring|9 years ago|reply
The idea of fermentation to kill bugs and what not is mentioned in the documentary How Beer Saved the World.

If I remember rightly, they make a brew out of pond water towards the end

https://vimeo.com/23278902

[+] JasonCEC|9 years ago|reply
Analytical Flavor Systems[0].

We built a AI for beer flavor profile consistency and quality optimization. NVIDIA wrote an awesome article about us here[1].

More Info

Analytical Flavor Systems uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to build tools for the food & beverage industry. Our Quality, Process, and Market Intelligence services create real-time predictive decisions metrics at each stage of a products life-cycle. We leverage our predictive models across products & industries for flavor profile optimization, production process optimization, demographic targeting & cognitive marketing - helping companies create and sell the best product to their highest value consumers with every batch.

Our Services

__Quality Intelligence__: Real-time predictive quality control, assurance, and improvement from human sensory data.

__Process Intelligence__: Real-time predictive process control and optimization from human sensory data + manufacturing & LIMS data.

__Market Intelligence__: Linking flavor-profile, demographics, and sales data to find the highest value consumer demographics for a product's flavor-profile.

[0]www.Gastrograph.com

[1] http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/09/02/beer/

[+] cnorm35|9 years ago|reply
BrewLog is helping smaller brewers manage their brewing operations/data online. Giving the smaller guys access to the tech the bigger companies have. https://brewlog.com/
[+] gregblass|9 years ago|reply
Hey, thanks Cody!

Greg here, Founder/CEO of BrewLog. I used to work with cody in a previous company.

I wouldn't necessarily describe our product that way. In fact, it was spun out of a 50BBL/yr brewery. A lot of the functionality is most useful to bigger breweries (notifications, activity feed).

The difference with much bigger breweries is that they have automated stuff. We're talking with Semens, and we're working with a few breweries to hook up smart WIFI/Cloud enabled temperature sensors to pull data in.

We've got a lot of smaller breweries in our Beta right now too. We're focusing on making the brew sheet work for all different types of breweries at the moment, as brewing processes can be different for various breweries.

We're about to launch a bunch of other neat stuff, like yeast management and tasting.

But yeah, if you've got a commercial brewery, we'd love to talk to you! Get in touch with me at [email protected].

[+] colinramsay|9 years ago|reply
I'd love to get involved in creating a decent piece of brewery management software, I've heard it's all pretty horrific (from a sample size of two). What's the state of the art in brewing software?
[+] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
Big or small?

I think the 'big' answer is all about low-level control logic and embedded systems. I can't speak to how horrifying it is relative to other industrial controls, but they're a world all their own.

On a homebrew scale, though, there's some awesome stuff like this: http://ohmbrewer.org/

The idea is that it's an actually valuable spot for an IoT product, because homebrewers would rather not sit for hours measuring exactly when to advance the brew. So you put together a monitoring-and-transition system, plug in your specs, and OhmBrew automates the process. Also, open source so you can check out what they're building.

(I'm not affiliated, but I met them and they seemed like awesome software & beer geeks.)

[+] theli0nheart|9 years ago|reply
Same! I've been interested for the longest time in doing the same. But no time. :(
[+] eymardfreire|9 years ago|reply
I'm a professional brewer and fermentation technologist, formally trained in Brewing Science and Technology, also in Microbiology and Microscopy. I'm in early stage development of a new software solution for breweries of any size and eventually expanding to wineries and distilleries. Prototype is already fully functional, it consists of constantly updated database of commercial raw ingredients along with its analysis, specifically for accurate recipe development, it will also assist and manage all of your operations from "grain to glass". Another big feature is the new and way more affordable technology the we are implementing of remote monitoring and eventually control and automation of all operations, both Hot Side, Cold Side and Storage. We also want to extend the software for management of Brewery QA & QC and Yeast Lab operations.

I'd love to discuss the project with whoever is interested, feel free to comment below :)

[+] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
http://ohmbrewer.org/

Open source IoT for homebrewers, designed to replace "sit and watch the temperature" with a cheap PID monitoring system.

[+] kidlogic|9 years ago|reply
I am a fan of what the guys at http://www.swig.co/ and http://www.drinkeasy.co/ are doing (disclaimer: I know the founders).

Swig is a social application that enables you to discover new brews that you might like (based off of you and your friend's preferences); sort of like Pandora for your palette.

Drinkeasy is an extension of Swig and enables you to order those drinks.

[+] dwightc|9 years ago|reply
ordered through drinkeasy's SMS bot for the first time (sits on top of ezras.com) a little while ago. Great service!
[+] fitzwatermellow|9 years ago|reply
That's a good question. I can easily foresee someone inventing a "vapable" alcohol solution that could be revolutionary ;)

For now, most of the capital is being allocated to distribution. "Uber for liquor" 1-Hour delivery model:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/10/the-new-age-of-alcohol/

[+] baccredited|9 years ago|reply
https://www.beermenus.com/ seems to have growing traction. I'm a happy user. Cool email alerts features.

I wish they had an API. I tried to build something on top of Untappd but kept hitting rate limits (note to Untappd: charge me)