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Ask HN: What are the hottest startups related to beer / brewing?
44 points by caiohdf on Sept 15, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 55 comments
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 ?




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.


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.


Wait, there's a non-alcoholic stout? Now I'm intrigued.


No, sorry to burst your bubble. That's one of their regular beers I like, sorry for getting your hopes up...


Nøgne Ø in Norway has a non-alcoholic stout called Inferial Stout. It's a really strange beast.


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.


Someone told me that it's because you consume too much fluids when drinking beer, causing mineral and vitamin imbalances or some such. (I ain't no scientalist!) This makes sense if true, since to reach the same level of alcohol in your blood you simply have to drink more beer than say vodka, which is obviously much stronger.


Some more anecdotal evidence. I've noticed that the style/quality of the beer greatly affects if there will be a hangover or not regardless of alcohol content. Has anyone else noticed that? or know why?


Anecdotally I concur. As I've gotten older beer hangovers have gotten much worse relative to other hangovers.


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.


Someone downthread mentioned Brewdog --- apparently they make a low-alcohol beer worth drinking:

https://www.brewdog.com/item/61/BrewDog/Nanny-State.html

Reviews:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16315/53885/

Never tried it myself, so I'd be interested to hear about it.


The carbonation is a little unusual and the mouthfeel is a little different because of the lack of ethanol but after doing a few weeks dry I developed a taste for it and often have it in preference to 'normal' beer at home now.

It is a mid-brown, nicely hoppy ale, highly flavoured as you would expect from brewdog, best enjoyed good and cold.


https://www.brewdog.com/

also see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/29/brewdo... which was on HN not long ago, discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11201300


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/


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


The only part of that documentary I don't like is that they purposely don't mention that they boil the pond water while brewing with it (like you would normal water when brewing). It would have been way cooler if they had shown that yeast alone was enough to kill off other bad organisms.


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/


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/


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 greg@brewlog.com.


Don't see an option to edit here, I meant 50K (50,000) BBL's, not 50


Typically if you click on the "X minutes ago" it links to the comment itself, then you can edit it.


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?


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.)


Same! I've been interested for the longest time in doing the same. But no time. :(


I think this looks interesting for home brewers http://www.grainfather.co.uk/


http://brewfactory.org/

"Full-Stack Homebrew with IoT and Node.js" a blog post about: https://blog.risingstack.com/brewfactory-full-stack-homebrew...


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 :)


I'll add one on the edge — Rhinegeist [0] in Cincinnati, Ohio.

They are not a startup in the sense of software or technology, but in the case of a very rapidly expanding craft brewery. Their growth and expansion since the first beer ~3 years ago look a lot like a startup, and they've raised at least $10M in funding [1].

[0]: http://www.rhinegeist.com/our-story

[1]: http://www.ohio.com/blogs/the-beer-blog/the-beer-blog-1.2731...


Tilt is an affordable innovative density meter. It measures the angle/tilt of the device floating in the fermenting beer. http://tilthydrometer.com/


Hey cool, someone's made one of them.

If only I'd published something in 2012 when I made a start at making a tilt hydrometer but didn't finish it. Silly patents http://www.google.com/patents/US20140260607


I don't understand the innovation that makes it possible, but Aurochs Brewing has a gluten-free beer that's actually tasty.

http://www.aurochsbrewing.com/


http://ohmbrewer.org/

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


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.


ordered through drinkeasy's SMS bot for the first time (sits on top of ezras.com) a little while ago. Great service!


Mezcal Tosba has an interesting story: http://www.moleandmore.com/mezcal-diaries/2014/1/26/mezcal-t...

As a New Englander I am biased, but I am partial to Downeast Cider: http://downeastcider.com/


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/


Re: Vaporized alcohol

It seems to already exist — Vaportini [0], Vapshot [1]. (I haven't tried either personally.)

[0]: http://vaportini.com/

[1]: http://www.vapshot.com


I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Brewbot yet

http://www.brewbot.io


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)


https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/bierkeller-beer-cellar/id104... is definitely worth a look :)


Marketplace for craft beers, direct from the brewery -

https://www.eebria.com/

They also have a trade site -

https://www.eebriatrade.com/


eebriatrade seem really interesting! I signed up to that a while ago, so that I can order a keg for christmas :)


There's NextGlass that's here in Wilmington NC. I think they're using machine learning to figure out how your brew really tastes. https://nextglass.co


Something might come out of this:

http://www.nature.com/news/tapping-genetics-for-better-beer-...

Editing genome of yeast with CRISPR


Brewpublik is a curated craft beer delivery service to your home or office. They're a 500 Startups company:

http://www.brewpublik.com/


Great company. Used by a ton of offices for beer in the Bay Area.


https://www.picobrew.com/ makes a good platform/product.


https://ubrew.cc/ - an open brewery where you brew the beer


It's a U-brew store like they have in every small city, except a bit more modern and much more hip because it's under a railway arch in London. But all of the founders and employees are very nice and they are doing well. :)


http://www.bierdar.com - An app for beerfinding using iBeacons?


https://www.brewtoad.com/


http://kegerator.com


http://www.whitelabs.com/

A team of biochemists found this. They have a very scientific approach and you should check out the kind of teams they have.


White Labs is not a startup: they've been providing liquid yeasts (to home brewers and breweries) for a fairly long time.

Chris White, of White Labs, wrote a great book on yeast:

https://www.amazon.com/Yeast-Practical-Fermentation-Brewing-...


Untappd




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