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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

booze

Kickstarter: The Travel Decanter Helps You Take Your Booze on the Go

Summer in my hometown means free concerts in the park, and nothing beats a sunny evening relaxing with friends and family while listening to a cover band recreate all your favorite hits of the 80s and 90s. Perhaps this summertime high is why I’m so intrigued by the Travel Decanter campaign on Kickstarter.

The Travel Decanter is pretty much what it sounds like: a way to transport booze without bringing along the whole bottle. It’s a hand-blown glass decanter that holds 500 ml of wine, whiskey or whatever your drink of choice is, protected by a double-walled stainless steel case that separates into two tumblers.

While the Kickstarter campaign says its good for travel (no leaky bottles in your luggage), I don’t know if I’m that desperate for a drink on the road. What I do like about it, however, is its simplicity and usefulness. Lugging a full bottle of wine to the park is a bit cumbersome, and you need to pack things like corkscrews and cups. The integrated design of the tumblers in the Travel Decanter distills (pardon the pun) all that down into a simple package. It protects your drink, keeps it from leaking, and provides two cups. Plus the mouth is wide enough for ice so you can pack different types of drinks like margaritas in your pic-a-nic basket.

With 11 days to go in its campaign, the Travel Decanter has already blown past its goal of $24,000 to raise more than $230,000. You can still grab a single Travel Decanter for $44, and it is projected to ship in December of this year (though it seems like there are some complications with international shipping, according to FAQ).

The Travel Decanter continues the recent trend of crowdfunded redesigns of common drinking vessels like the Mosi Tea Brewer and the Bolde protein drink shaker. But as with any crowdfunded hardware project, caveat emptor. A great design and prototype is one thing, manufacturing at scale is another. Just ask the folks who backed the Rite-Press.

While the Travel Decanter won’t be ready for this set of summer concerts, I’m tempted to pledge to pick one up for next year.

So Long, Overpours. Nectar Raises $10M for Better Booze Management

If you’re a customer in a bar, a little extra Bacardi in your banana daiquiri is a good thing. If you’re the owner of that bar, however, those overpours can add up and cost you big time. This is just one facet of booze management that Nectar is aiming to solve, and as TechCrunch reports, the company just raised $10 million to help accomplish that.

Nectar is a hardware/software combo that uses specialized bottle caps outfitted with ultrasound tech for real-time pour monitoring. From the company’s FAQ:

Nectar smart caps use ultrasound to measure bottle levels in real-time. Once the bottle is poured and put back on the shelf it triggers a measurement to calculate the amount of liquor left in the bottle and exactly how much was poured out.

Nectar also offers a software only package that provides a software-based visual reference tool for bar managers to more easily count what’s left in their bottles during inventory checks.

Nectar’s visual inventory management tool

Nectar sells 20 caps plus the software for $99 a month, or there’s a 100 cap enterprise package that costs $399 a month. The software only inventory management package is $49.99 a month (if you pay annually).

While I’m being a bit snide about killing overpours (which some consider good customer service), the fact is that in the tight margin business of bars and restaurants, being able to better control your costs is important. Tools like Nectar can take what is a mundane and cumbersome task, going through your bar, bottle by bottle, and makes it more efficient and more immediate. It also builds in some accountability with staff who typically provide a little extra when their friends come in.

Additionally, insight into purchase patterns give bars the ability to see exactly what alcohols are popular and when, and create drinks and promotions to better harness that demand. Rum’s popular on a Saturday night? Pina Coladas are half off! Or, whatever, you get the drift.

Nectar isn’t the only company bringing precise controls and data to the bar industry. Pubbino makes a smart tap to keep track of beer pours, and MyWah’s Edgar is a countertop wine dispenser that pours out pinots and more at their proper temperature.

Nectar’s fundraise was led by Dragon Capital.vc, and brings the total amount raised by the company to $14.6 million. Which is something I’m sure the founders are raising glass filled with an exact amount drink to.

Smart Spirits Uses Flavor Pods to Re-Create Booze (but Not Mixed Drinks)

Smart Spirits is a new entrant in the at-home, pod-based, connected countertop cocktail appliance market (hat tip to The Drinks Business). Though unlike it’s competition, Smart Spirits doesn’t make mixed cocktails, it’s system creates a simulacra of straight up booze like whiskey, gin, rum and more.

Smart Spirits is basically a Keurig for spirits, with four parts to its system: A Bluetooth enabled dispenser, a bottle of “grain neutral spirit” drink, and a variety of flavor pods like “The Taste of American Bourbon,” and a mobile app you can use to control everything. Once set up, you create your drink and can even control the strength of the drink or add water.

Smart Spirits is taking a different approach from other alcohol-related home countertop appliances like Bartesian and Drinkworks. Those devices mix together actual cocktails like mai-tais and cosmopolitans. Smart Spirits just makes the base booze that you can either drink straight or use with other ingredients to make mixed cocktails on your own.

Whiskey and gin snobs will undoubtedly scoff at such a machine and Smart Spirits’ claim that “it is now possible to replicate the taste from the aging process with natural and nature identical flavours…” But aficionados are probably not Smart Spirits’ target market.

When I think about it further, however, I’m not sure who the target market is. Figuring this out is even harder as there isn’t any pricing information on the site for either the machine or the grain spirit or the flavor pods. So we don’t know how much any of it costs, or if there’s a subscription.

At first, this seems to be a fit for space-conscious millennials as there’s no need to buy or stock a full bar’s worth of bottles when you can get all the boozey flavor you want from easily stored pods. But since this only makes base drinks, you’d still need mixers like vermouth or curacao or Tide pods or whatever it is the kids are drinking these days.

Like so many other things, however, the success or failure of Smart Spirits will come down to execution. If it can indeed recreate “The Taste of Irish Whiskey,” it may find its niche among people the tech savvy who like to drink, but don’t want a bunch of bottles cluttering up their place.

We’ll see as the Smart Spirits System will roll out this year across the U.S., U.K., and European Union.

Want To Become A Mixologist? There’s a Subscription Delivery Service For That

With alcohol-delivery services becoming the norm, it’s time to take the next step in the evolution of the online drink: cocktail-making kits delivered to your door.

Some might question whether $50 per month for a cocktail kit is worth the money. And sure, if your idea of a mixed drink is tonic water splashed onto an arbitrary amount of vodka, said kit might be a waste of money. But if you’re after high-quality ingredients and a chance to learn the art of mixology, Shaker and Spoon is definitely worth checking out.

The company was born in 2015 in Brooklyn, when designer Anna Gorovoy and animator Mike Milyavsky decided to apply the meal kit concept to drinks. You won’t find any rum-and-coke recipes here. The idea is to recreate the kind of bespoke cocktails found in upscale bars, but in the comfort of your own home. The monthly service aims to turn subscribers into tastemakers and, one assumes, keep them from defaulting to beer cans as party refreshments.

To do that, Gorovoy and Milyavsky enlisted “The People’s Champion of Bartending,” Russell Davis. Davis has some well-documented mixology chops and also owns a high-end spirits company. He currently oversees the creation of Shaker and Spoon’s many recipes that get shipped out with the boxes.

And those recipes will certainly widen your cocktail palette, whether they call for snap peas mixed with gin or lemon-lychee cordial and sake. Each box includes all ingredients needed, except the alcohol itself. (The company has a thorough explanation for this.) Subscribers can preview upcoming boxes to decide if the contents are appealing or if it’s better to skip a month.

As far as cost goes, it’s a lot cheaper than taking a mixology class or trying out new drinks at a bar. Boxes range from $40 to $50 per month, with ingredients to make 12 cocktails (4 per each recipe). Considering that the average high-end cocktail in Brooklyn costs at least $14, often more, a $50 price tag doesn’t seem too steep even when you add the extra money for the alcohol.

Some are calling Shaker and Spoon the Blue Apron of booze, which is fair. I’d argue, though, that the service actually reaches beyond that. It’s going a bit far to say the company promotes an entire lifestyle (yet), but they offer a pretty in-depth education on high-end tastes via the website. Ever wonder how to properly crush ice? Shaker and Spoon will tell you. Did you know the Coupe glass was modeled after Marie Antoinette’s breast? Neither did I until I read about it the site. All things considered, I’d dub the service “mixology school in a box.”

In our transaction-based society where we eat faster, drink more, and hardly stop to savor either, it’s encouraging to see a company favor quality over quantity and grow popular at the same time. Let’s hope they’re paving the way for new era, where we learning the craft of food and drink is as important as getting the materials themselves delivered.