The future?

[DCLavs]

http://brewbot.pr.co/86744-brewbot-raises-1-5m-to-democratize-the-world-of-brewing

http://www.brewbot.io/

A year ago Brewbot announced their robot that brews beer, a smart appliance controlled by a smartphone app that provides the perfect brewing environment for anyone to brew their own beer.

Since successfully crowd-funding the project via Kickstarter the Belfast-based team has been on a worldwide quest to scale the production of the device. This brought the Belfast-based team to Austin, Texas where they joined Techstars accelerator to develop their business. During their Techstars Demo Day pitch they gave a taste of the future of beer.

Brewbot's app features a recipe platform that allows anyone to download or create a recipe so that they can brew a beer of any style. Brewbot takes care of the temperatures, timings and volumes, allowing you to follow along on the app as water is turned into beer. In order to achieve this, the Brewbot team have developed a new data and visual format that they call the 'DNA of Beer'. This format opens up the reproduction and collaboration of beer recipes, giving brewers the opportunity to share and distribute their beer globally without even shipping a bottle.

The recipe platform already has growing interest from commercial brewers including Russian River Brewery, Galway Bay, and Tiny Rebel. Galway Bay's award-winning Head Brewer Chris Treanor said,

"The global revolution of craft brewing is happening and it's a great thing to be a part of. There are talented brewers producing incredible local beers, but there is little chance of them being found due to the difficulty of exporting, scaling and distribution.

We struggle to sell our beer a few hundred miles away but the Brewbot platform and technology changes everything, all of a sudden someone in Australia can enjoy our beer. There is a craft beer revolution but this is a whole different level."

As well as their expansion into the US, Brewbot have continued to scale their team, announcing the addition of Sebastian Hassinger as Chief Operating Officer, who is ex-Apple, Oracle and IBM, and Andrew Nordman to their software engineering team. Nordman is already known as a significant contributor to the brewing automation and brewing community and his hire is described by their CEO Chris McClelland as a "commitment to open source technology."

After one of the most successful UK Kickstarter projects and graduating from Techstars, the team secured a stellar range of investors, including Makerbot investor Brad Feld, in an oversubscribed $1.5M seed round. The round was led by Bebo founder and CEO Michael Birch and features London-based angel Federico Pirzio-Biroli, Boulder VC Bullet Time Ventures, Hallett Capital, a new fund in Northern Ireland TechStart NI, a new community supported early stage fund Galvanize, and SparkLabs Global based in Asia and the US. Veterans of crowd-funding, the company also raised a portion of their round using Angel List.

Brewbot's CEO Chris McClelland said about the investment,

"Not only have we gained investors, we've gained the experiences of people in the manufacturing, food and drink, engineering, and software industries. As we embark on a world that's at the intersection of old and new industries this experience adds serious value to our business."



£1700 + £340 VAT + £140 Shipping....maybe not 

[LordEoin]

lol yeah, a few scrap kegs, fittings and argos kettles will do me fine! (for now....) 

[winstonia]

I don't get what extra stuff it does

[LordEoin]

what extra stuff does an iPhone do?
Gives rich-kids something shiny to spend their money on!

[winstonia]

Compared to that Braumeister device

[Bazza]

Fair play to them. Could end up being the Google of the brewing world (cash rich, full of hipsters!)

Time to grow me a fashionably over-sized beard and send off a cv.

Now where did I leave those ill-fitting trousers, the ones that require you to have clean pants on.....

-Barry

[johnrm]

Is there an Android version?

[bigvalen]

What do people think of the "brewbot core" open, where you provide your own fermenters and boilers ? That is tempting to me...