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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Bartesian

Bartesian Focuses on Drinks, Hands Manufacturing to Hamilton Beach

Bartesian said today that it has signed a three-year deal to make Hamilton Beach the exclusive manufacturing and distribution partner of its forthcoming countertop cocktail making appliance.

Bartesian co-founder Ryan Close told us by phone that this move will allow his company to focus on the drink making and development side of the business, while appliance giant Hamilton Beach can leverage its massive manufacturing expertise and retail distribution channels to bring the actual cocktail machine to market.

“It was a soul searching time,” said Close “Do we want to be an appliance company or a CPG company? If we wanted to do both, it would stretch things too far.”

The Bartesian countertop device uses combination of flavor capsules to hold liquors and mixers, which the appliance automatically blends into a variety of cocktails. It would be easy to liken Bartesian to a “Keurig for cocktails,” but Close winces at that comparison, noting that “this isn’t some sugary mix or powder.”

The machine will still be branded as Bartesian, and Close said they will keep their target release date of Q4 this year, as well as the $299 price tag. Bartesian still owns all of its IP, and will work with Hamilton Beach to develop future generations of the cocktail appliance.

This is the second big partnership for Bartesian. Last year they raised a “seven figure” round of funds from Beam Suntory, one of the world’s largest spirits conglomerates. That partnership has helped Bartesian expand its work developing new drinks and drink-concocting appliances. The company will launch with seven capsulized concoctions and will roll out fifty cocktail mixes over time.

While Close wouldn’t share the exact details of the Hamilton Beach arrangement, this seems to be a smart play for Bartesian. The company only has seven employees, and the transition from concept to manufacturing has been a big stumbling block for many upstart drink appliance makers. Having Hamilton Beach take over the production part of the business will hopefully give Bartesian the heft and scale it needs to overcome any obstacles and reach a mass market.

Bartesian, Maker Of Home Cocktail Robots, Raises “Seven Figure” Round From Beam

Bartesian, a cocktail robot startup, has received an additional round of funding from Beam Suntory, the company behind such brands as Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek.

This is the second investment by Beam in Bartesian. The first came just over a year ago, and the latest round was a result of a contingency written into the first deal that allowed Beam to acquire more equity in the company.

Bartesian CEO Ryan Close told the Spoon that Beam “had a provision on the original investment that allowed them the option to invest x future dollars (7 figures). They liked what they have seen with regards to production ramp up, quality, and most importantly taste of the finished product – so they decided to execute that option.”

Bartesian’s system utilizes flavor capsules and chambers to hold the liquor and other mixers. The system mixes the spirits and mixers from the four chambers with flavors from the capsules to make a variety of cocktails. According to the company, the Bartesian capsules do not use powder, but instead a variety of real fruit juice concentrates and non-alcohol liqueurs.

It’s an interesting investment for a spirits company like Beam Suntory, one of the world’s largest spirits conglomerates. Beam hasn’t historically invested in technology startups, but a product like Bartesian could extend their reach into subscription services as well as give them a better understanding of what consumers are actually mixing at home. Perfect Company has shown that by extending the reach into the actual cocktail making opens up a treasure trove of data for spirits companies.

The company is expected to ship in 2018. Another home cocktail robot startup, Somabar, is also expecting to ship next year.

You can see Ryan Close talking about the growing use of technology for the home bar in a 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit session video below.

The Smart Bar: HomeBrew to BartenderBots from The Spoon on Vimeo.

Can This Self-Driving Car Pioneer Crack The Code On Cooking Robots?

The home cooking robot market is, shall we say, in the early innings.

Not that folks aren’t trying. Companies like Sereneti and GammaChef are working on creating full home cooking robots, while others like Rotimatic and Bartesian are applying robotics more narrowly to tackle single-function machines to make flatbread or cocktails.

But it’s pretty self-evident at this point we’ve only just thrown out the first pitch.

So when the father of the self-driving car puts out a feeler for a new project he’s working on in the area of home cooking robotics, needless to say it piqued my interest.

According to Business Insider, Sebastian Thrun, the man behind early autonomous car effort Stanley, is building a team for a project that will develop “technology to modernize how we prepare daily healthy and tasty meals at home.” The company’s stealth name is SVFactory.

Thrun’s entry into this market is exciting if for only his proven ability jumpstart new industries through innovation. Not only did his work at DARPA eventually lead to his shepherding Google’s early work on autonomous vehicles, but Thrun also went on to found Google’s so-called ‘moonshot factory’, Google X, and has been instrumental in helping to democratize the education market through the founding of Udacity, a hugely popular online learning site.

But while Thrun clearly has an ability to make futuristic technology concepts more market ready, he has his work cut out for him with consumer cooking robots. It remains to be seen how robotics can be applied to home cooking in a way that makes consumers feel, well, at home. Futuristic efforts like that of Moley are intriguing, but I’m not entirely sure how mass market and practical putting two giant robots arms would be in a normal home.

Still, count me as excited about the entrance of a heavy hitter like Thrun into the market. Let’s hope he can hit a home run or two.

Is Robotics The Next Hot Sector For Food Tech Investment?

If you spend any time analyzing the food tech investment landscape, you notice something pretty quickly: the vast majority of funding goes to food delivery.

And while food delivery will continue to be the biggest slice of the investment pie for the foreseeable future, recently there’s been a noticeable uptick in non-delivery related food tech investments.

One area outside of delivery that is piquing the interest of investors is food robotics. In the last year, we’ve seen numerous investments in both professional and consumer focused food robotics.

A few examples from 2016:

Otto Robotics: The Seattle area startup recently raised $1.5 million for its food assembly robot for restaurants.  The company, which is still in stealth, raised its funding from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures and Draper Associates.

Casabots: This company which makes salad assembly robot for cafeterias and restaurants picked up a $100 thousand in spring of 2016. The company is planning on producing its salad robot at scale in 2017.

Zume Pizza: This ambitious startup wants to not only make pizzas using robotics, but also puts them to use in its delivery trucks to help bring fresh pizza to your home. They raised an impressive $23 million late last year.

Drink Robots: Robotic cocktail startups Bartesian and Somabar both recently picked up funding, with Somabar receiving a $1.5 million and Bartesian getting an undisclosed amount from Beam Suntory, the spirits company behind Jim Beam whiskey brand. Early this year pro-cocktail robot company Monsieur picked up $1.2 million.

Gammachef: This Croatian maker of consumer cooking robots is still developing its first product, but Podravka, one of Croatia’s largest and oldest packaged food companies, made news in the country by making Gammachef its first startup investment.

Why all the interest in robots? In the professional markets like back of house food assembly, it’s clear that this technology could help automate repeatable, high-volume tasks such as making a pizza or preparing a hamburger. While automating (and eliminating) jobs with robotics may not be something large restaurant chains want to discuss publicly in today’s political environment, there is no doubt food is an industry that will see a large-scale injection of robotic technology over the next decade.

Consumer food robotics offer a less sure path for investors, mostly because robots excel at tasks that are high-volume and repeatable. Unless you’re planning on feeding your neighbors every day or drinking 30 cocktails after a hard day at work, chances are you don’t need a robot. Still, over time product categories like multicookers (i.e. Thermomix) will incorporate more automation and startups like Gammachef will continue to work on making food assembly in the home easier. At some point, I expect someone to create a compelling and affordable cooking robot that that captures the imagination (and dollars) of consumers.

Will food robotics ever rival delivery as an investment category? Probably not anytime soon. However, just as food delivery was seen as ripe for disruption by the investor class, I think food assembly and creation is now very much on investors’ radar and will take a bigger piece of the pie in coming years.

IoT-Led Disruption Powers the Future of the Bar Business

Fans of the Spike TV show, Bar Rescue, are more than aware of the challenges of being a barkeep in a highly competitive market. Issues that include employees pilfering from the till and drinking while on duty are one thing, but over pouring and giving away free drinks are a recipe for disaster—not to mention bankruptcy—for bar owners charged with daily multitasking.

Inventory control systems are crucial to a bar’s success and have been in place for decades. Moving from a pen and paper operation, such processes evolved into the 20th century with tracking spreadsheets and early use of RFID technology. Prime for disruption, though, the hospitality industry has been the focus of IoT investments that offer tighter control over bar inventory management, with some options replicating Amazon’s Dash button. Using web-based technology, the Dash button facilitates replenishment when stocks reach a predetermined level by directly contacting the supplier.

Palo Alto-based Nectar is in the development phase of its product which automates Amazon’s Dash button by automatically reordering spirits when their volume reaches a set threshold. Armed with $4.55 million of fresh financing, Nectar hopes to build a solution which can eventually create a cache of data that can be used for predictive analysis to understand patterns which can help in business development. For example, knowing seasonality trends of various cocktails can allow pre-ordering in bulk which can save a bar owner considerable money. In addition, such advanced inventory control systems can track the habits of individual bartenders by giving them individual IDs that tie to the business’ Point of Sale system. That way, such costly behavior over pouring or an abundance of free drinks can be spotted and remedied.

In addition to Nectar, Bar Fly from a company called Local Libations offers a smart-device-based keg monitoring system. Using geotags attached to the individual kegs, a smartphone app or computer can track the beer volume and provide automatic reordering. Much like Nectar, Bar Fly can compile data used for predictive analysis related such areas as customer drinking patterns and busiest hours for staffing purposes.

Following the success of single-server coffee brewer, Keurig, innovators in the IoT space are racing to take the lead in the home bar market. The current state of the home mixology world consists of a mix of startups, with products approaching the market via crowd funding, and those with “cocktail robots” available at retail. These auto-bartenders come in two flavors—closed loop systems which require the consumer to buy premixed drink pods from the device manufacturer and open-loop systems which allow the home drink master to use his own booze and mixers. In both cases, these countertop marvels connect to a smart device via Wi-Fi and allow the user to select from a myriad of various cocktail choices. The machine, such as Burlingame, Calif.,-based Bernooli, then precisely measures the libations to build the perfect Martini, Bloody Mary, Rob Roy or something more exotic, like a Blue Lagoon or Bahama Mama.

Bernooli uses a smart spout system which, when paired with its proprietary app, uses Bluetooth to light up the bottles required for a given adult beverage. The spout allows precise pouring amounts are for the home user. Others in the race to become the Keurig of the cocktail set include Somabar, Monsieur, and Bartesian.

With so many options in the development pipeline, clearly IoT and the “robot cocktail” space is headed in some interesting directions. Additional market contenders include Picobrew, which uses smart technology to turn consumers into home beer brewmasters.  With another twist to attract the wine connoisseur, D-Vine offers mini tubes of wine correctly cooled and aerated for proper serving.

 

The Year In Food Robots

When you hear the words ‘food’ and ‘robot’ in the same sentence, chances are something like Softbank’s Pepper pops to mind, a modern Rosie-the-robot like humanoid with the hands and feet required to move around a kitchen and flip a pancake or two.

But when it comes to the kitchen, reality hasn’t quite caught up with the world envisioned by Hanna-Barbera, at least not yet. While there are companies who seem pretty serious about creating human-like creatures to take over our kitchen, the kitchen robot invasion, at least for the foreseeable future, will most likely consist of many more single-function machines that can automate tasks like drink mixing or stirring food in a pot rather than machines that act as a humanoid master chef (with one or two exceptions).

There’s also a big difference between what’s happening in the consumer kitchen compared to the pro kitchen.  While consumers will witness a slow and subtle invasion of single-purpose devices into our homes, in the pro kitchen we’re likely to see a variety of robotic systems put into use in restaurant environments over the next few years.

Below we take a look at what happened in food robots in 2016 and what to expect in 2017:

Consumer Cooking Robots in 2016: Failure To Boot

When it comes to consumer multifunction cooking robots, 2016 was mostly a non-starter. Despite showing at this year’s CES, Sereneti never shipped their product. OneCook, coming off a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2015 in which they raised over $100 thousand, missed its August ship date and has paused production without an update in months.

If you really want the closest thing to an all-in-one cooking robot today, your best bet is something like the Thermomix, a multi-cooker that I’ve been trying out and have discovered it does a whole lot of things and does them well. Sure, it may not have robotic arms to peel garlic or slice potatoes, but did you think you could automate everything in the kitchen?

Bartenderbots

If after a crazy year you feel you could use a drink, here’s some good news: the bartenderbots are coming.

Two startups, Bartesian and Somabar, are both in the process of bringing drink mixers to market that automate the process of making a cocktail.  Both use chambers to hold spirits, while the Bartesian uses a pod-based system to add flavors a la Keurig, while the Somabar has an infuser chamber to hold flavors that are added to the drink in the mixing process.

Both have told The Spoon they are planning to ship in first half of 2017.

Breadbots 

If drinking isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like a breadbot.

The Rotimatic, a robot that makes roti (Indian flatbread) and wraps began shipping in August. The wrap-robot is made by Zimplistic, a Singapore based startup that first showed off the product in January 2015 at CES. The company is working towards shipping the product to the US in 2017.

Another automated breadmaker, the Flatev, launched their Kickstarter campaign for a pod-based tortilla maker in May and indicated this month they are on track for an August 2017 ship date.

Ok, So Maybe We Do Have A Chefbot: Moley

If you’ve seen a story about a full kitchen robot in 2016, chances are it was about Moley. The startup, which touts itself as makers of the first robotic kitchen, has created a prototype of robotic chef that uses two fully robotic arms to mimic the movements of BBC master chef Tim Anderson.  While Moley appears to be the kind of robot that would work well in a pro kitchen, particularly if it was surrounded by a supporting cast of sous chefs to prepare ingredients (the Moley robot only prepares the final meal, but doesn’t do prep work or cleanup), the company envisions a consumer version of the Moley robot complete with two robotic arms, a built-in oven, a cooktop and a touchscreen to control the system.

While the idea of a fully robotic cooking robot is intriguing, I have my doubts about the readiness of the concept for consumer kitchens in 2017. Partly for practical considerations, as the Moley robot will require a large footprint, will require professional installation and, at this point, only performs part of the cooking process.  My biggest concern, however, is cost: while the company has yet to release pricing, I suspect it will cost somewhere north of five thousand (maybe much more) given it has a built in cooktop, stove and, oh yeah, robotic arms. All of this built-in tech means only those willing to spends lots of money on a futuristic concept will buy a Moley, provided it works well (and that’s a big if).

Despite these concerns, I am excited for the work Moley is doing, even though I’m not convinced the consumer market is ready for the product just yet.

You can see the Moley prototype at work below:

The robotic chef - Moley Robotics

Here Come The Probots

While the consumer cooking robotics market has surprisingly bare shelves in late 2016, the pro kitchen saw significant progress in 2016. There are a number of different ‘probots’ being developed for the restaurant and professional kitchen. Below are a few of the food (p)robot innovators we watched closely in 2016:

Casabots

Casabots is a salad assembly robot company that began in 2014 after founder and CEO Deepak Sekar had experimented with creating a food robot for his home. He soon realized that a more practical application of robotics was in professional environments and, before long, Sally was born. Sally, the company’s salad-assembly robot, looks a little (or a lot) like a refrigerator and allows the user to pick their ingredients using a touchscreen. Sekar told me that they are working with corporations like Aramark that run cafeterias to have Sally installed in high-volume work environments and expects to have Sally ready for market in early 2017.

Momentum Machines

Back in 2012, a new company emerged from food tech startup incubator Lemnos Labs with the goal of not helping humans in the world of fast food, but replacing them all together.

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” said Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas in an interview with Xconomy. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

A couple of years later, the company unveiled a prototype of a machine that could make up to 400 hamburgers per hour. The device, the tech details of which the company has kept largely under wraps, is described in the diagram below:

momentummachines-0

What’s fascinating about Momentum Machines technology is that while it works at industrial speed, it’s not mass producing the same burger over and over. It’s creating up to 400 custom burgers per hour. That’s right: up to 400 uniquely crafted, cooked, assembled and bagged hamburgers per hour.

And now, after going silent since 2014, the company created a buzz in June when it was discovered they’d applied for a building permit to create its first restaurant in San Francisco. While the roboburger joint has yet to open, we’re excited to head there in 2017 to try out a fully robot-produced hamburger.

Zume Pizza

The craziest – and perhaps most brilliant  – of all the pro food robots is from Zume Pizza. Founded by former Zynga President Alex Garden, Zume utilizes robotics in two points in the process (production and distribution) to get fresh machine-assisted artisan-style pizzas to consumers.

The pizza production process utilizes three robots and a conveyor belt system to produce pizzas at a fast rate for consumption in-restaurant or delivered to the home. The process includes three robots for production (Pepe for sauce dispensing, Marta for sauce spreading, and Bruno for loading and unloading pizza into the oven).  Humans work side-by-side in the Zume pizza kitchen, adding ingredients to the pizza, correcting any errors by the robots.

If you think the robot’s job done at Zume once it comes out of the kitchen, you’d be wrong. The company is working on creating large pizza trucks that utilize what it calls “Baking on the way” technology, a patented system that employs 56 individual ovens that are wired to initiate a cook just minutes before the arrival at the consumer’s door to give them an “out of the oven” experience.

The company, which opened its first restaurant this year, has applied for permits to operate its mobile pizza ovens on wheels and just this month raised close to $23 million in equity financing, so there’s a good chance we’ll see more restaurants – and possibly some pizza ovens on wheels – from Zume in 2017.

Starship 

While Starship isn’t really a food robot, there’s a good chance it’s robots – or ones like it – will help bring food to us in the future. That’s because Starship, a company cofounded by Skype cofounder Ahti Heinla, makes sidewalk delivery robots that are already being put into trials by large grocery stores to deliver food to consumers.

When I spoke to Heinla earlier this year, he made it clear he thought robotic delivery had huge advantages over the traditional method of humans and cars.

“With robots,” he said, ”the cost is in technology, manufacturing, and maintenance. The safest bet you can do is that technology is getting cheaper all the time. It’s just a question of time before this (delivery) will be one dollar, fifty cents.”

What’s interesting is Starship robots still require humans to control them – much like today’s drones – in the process of a delivery. Heinla envisions a human remotely controlling up to 10 or so Starship sidewalk delivery robots at some point, but unlike cars or even drones, what makes these robots ready for delivery deployment today is how slow they move.

“With a sidewalk robot, when a robot encounters a situation that is too complicated for the automatic system to handle, the robot can simply stop on the sidewalk and call up the (human) operator to help. This is the beauty of using a robot moving at pedestrian speeds on a sidewalk.”

Looking Forward

2016 saw significant advancement in food and cooking robotics. While the professional kitchen is further along in the food robot revolution in part because efforts to add robotics to centralized and professional food production facilities have excited for decades, we think 2017 could be an exciting year for the consumer market too as Moley, bartenderbots and even cooking robots like Sereneti finally make their debut. Investor interest in both sectors seems to be rising, so we also expect some new companies to debut in 2017 and beyond that bring robotics to the kitchen.

Lastly, there is a whole bunch of innovation going on in cooking automation and food 3D printing, areas which often overlap with kitchen robotics (take the pancakebot, for example). We expect those areas to be equally exciting in 2017.

Stay tuned and check back here at The Spoon as we cover the food robot revolution – and more – in 2017.

Investment In Cocktail Mixing Robots Is Heating Up

In the whiskey business, older usually means better. But if you’re Beam Suntory, the company which owns such iconic whiskey brands as Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, sometimes new ain’t so bad either.

Which may be why the company recently became a strategic investor in Bartesian, a startup that creates drink mixing robots. While the exact amount of the investment is undisclosed, Bartesian co-founder Ryan Close puts the amount “in the millions.” The Bartesian cocktail mixing robot utilizes capsules to add the flavors and mixers to the cocktail. Close said they would use the money to expand their capsule selection, put the Bartesian into production and for R&D for the next-generation machine.

Beam Suntory isn’t the only investor taking an interest in the nascent robo-bartender market. Last week, Somabar quietly closed a $1.5 million funding round from Tech Coast Angels, an angel investor network focused on Southern California startups. The round was described as “bridge funding,” which means Somabar is still on the hunt for a larger series A round. This most recent investment follows an undisclosed investment in October 2014 and a round of debt financing in May of 2015.

Interest in home cocktail automation isn’t altogether surprising given the size of the $3 billion ready-to-drink (RTD) market. RTDs,  premixed cocktail drinks largely consumed at home, provide consumers mass-produced cocktail drinks that lack the specific tailoring or flourishes a bartender might provide. A home drink maker would give consumers a way to mix drinks that are closer to what they might get in a bar.

Not surprisingly, investment interest in robotic bartender technology also extends to the professional market. Monsieur, a startup based out of Atlanta, has been working on a robotic bartender since 2012 and received a $1.2 million Series A investment in February of this year.

And of course, robots aren’t the only game in town when it comes to bringing new tech to mixology. Late last year, Perfect Company, which makes the Perfect Drink scale system for home cocktail mixing, received a $4 million investment from Oregon Angel Fund. Perfect Company CEO Mike Wallace has indicated the company has sold hundreds of thousands of its Perfect Drink products.

Related: See Bartesian cofounder Ryan Close speak at the Smart Kitchen Summit

Libation Liberation: Applying App Distribution & Marketplace Dynamics To Craft Food

One of the most exciting – but undercovered – aspects of food and kitchen tech is how it offers new monetization models for creators. I’m not talking about e-books or other more conventional formats for beer makers, chefs, and mixologists, but instead how creators can harness the power of connected hardware and software to begin to create digital distribution and content license opportunities.

What do I mean by this? As I wrote over at Forbes in a piece focused on craft alcohol, we are beginning to see examples of startups creating licensing models that leverage creative work in the worlds of craft beer and cocktails. While these businesses have been, by necessity, hyperlocal because they produce artisanal food crafts in a specific location at small scale, connected products with associated marketplaces and publishing platforms could change that. By bringing the combination of precision automation and digital distribution to the market through connected hardware, these startups are creating new ways for a bartender or master brewer to get their work out into the world – and around – the world.

As I wrote in Forbes:

PicoBrew’s Mitchell talked about this in the abstract a year ago when they launched the Kickstarter for their new beer brewing appliance, but with their beer brewing appliance now shipping, they’re doing it. They have licensed recipes from over 130 craft brewers across the world and are now pushing out PicoPaks, which are essentially pods with all the grains and hops tailored to the specific recipes of each of these brewers. The owner of a PicoBrew in Boca Raton, Florida can buy a PicoPak with a recipe from a beer brewer in Oregon and have the beer in 5-7 days (how long it takes to make beer with the PicoBrew).

Bartesian is doing something similar with craft cocktails by licensing the recipes and putting into pods.

But it’s not just liquor. ChefSteps, makers of the Joule sous vide cooker, is looking to create a community and influencer recipe platform that would enable a chef to create his or her own branded cooking education, guidance, and community experience. So instead of just writing a blog post for how to make sous vide steak, for example, J. Kenji López-Alt could also have an associated “guided cooking recipe” that offers video and some specific automated instructions for the Joule itself.

Of course, all of this is early, and we have yet to see how any of this can work at scale. However, I do believe applying digital distribution and marketplace dynamics to craft food creation could result in a massive shift and provide new lifelines to creators who have been limited both in geographic reach and scale.

(Video) Are Cocktails An Art Form Or Something You Can Delegate To Robots? Both.

Is cocktail making an art form or something you want to let the bots do?

If you’re Ryan Close, the cofounder of Bartesian, the answer is both.

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Close talked about how some people initially resented the idea of letting a robotic drink mixer do the work.

“Early on we had some people at CES thumb their nose at the idea of (automated) cocktails,” said Close. He would tell them that he wasn’t there to tell them how to make a cocktail, and yes, it is an art form, but then suggested that they’re not competing with bartenders or self-styled mixologists, but instead the huge market for ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails, a $3 billion market market growing at almost 7% a year.

RTDs are “high fructose, high sugar,” said Close. Not only that, he said, but bartenderbots make fresher cocktails since they are still local mixology while a mass-produced cocktail is not. RTDs are “batch made; you can’t offer variety to your guests. There is not anything visceral to it, it’s twisting a cap off, whereas the art of mixology is still happening in our machine, you can see the liquor coming in, everything is being reconstituted, so it’s incredibly fresh.”

He also pointed out how bartenders themselves like the idea of using their recipe-driven drink capsules, since it allowed them to do something they’ve never done before: Extend their reach beyond the bar.

“Some of these bartenders who are very proud of what they created, they can only offer it in the restaurant,” said Close. Now, “they can create mixology, and we can put it into our capsules, and they can brand a ‘Nobu Malibu’ line of capsules.’

This recipe licensing model is similar to the one PicoBrew if offering, only instead they license recipes from master brewers at craft breweries from around the world such as Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale.

This allows novices “stand on the should of giants, great brewers, and great recipes,” said Bill Mitchell, PicoBrew CEO, who appeared alongside Close in a panel moderated by Digital Trends Jenny McGrath.

Check out the video above to hear the full session.