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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cocktail

What The Heck Happened to Drinkworks?

One of the stories I missed while I was out of the country in December was the shuttering of Drinkworks.

What makes the announcement so unexpected was, overall, things seemed to be generally going well: the company was expanding nationally, sales seemed on the uptick, and they’d even just announced the newest generation drink appliance in October of 2021.

Then, less than two months later, the joint venture between Anheuser-Busch and Keurig Dr. Pepper announced it was ceasing operations.

I don’t have to tell you how unusual it is for a company to announce a new product and then shut down just months later. And, now, almost a month after the news, we really don’t have a good answer for what happened, which is why it’s still worth asking: what the heck happened?

Generally, what that type of quick about-face tells me is that the higher-ups – and by that I mean the two companies involved in the joint venture funding – decided the project wasn’t working and pulled the plug.

So what does ‘not working’ mean? It could be any number of things: Appliance or beverage pod sales weren’t meeting forecasts. Customer satisfaction was low. The project was sucking up too many resources. Maybe the two companies didn’t like working together or their strategies diverged. As I said, it could be anything and we may never know (unless, of course, a former insider wants to tell us. Please reach out if you’d like to do so privately).

The end of Drinkworks also begs the question: is this the end for home cocktail appliances? Bartesian – and now Black and Decker – would argue no. As for me, I’m not sure I want a pod-making machine, but I would take a voice-enabled cocktail marking robot.

Watch my video look at the demise of Drinkworks below.

What The Heck Happened to Drinkworks?

Barsys’ New Connected Coaster Can Help You Make Better Cocktails

It’s the holiday season, which, for the Albrechts, typically means some kind of holiday soirée complete with a signature cocktail. Though that cocktail typically involves large pitchers, eyeballing ingredients (followed by many adjustments) and generous overpours.

Perhaps the new connected coaster from Barsys could help us better moderate our mixology. Yesterday Barsys, the company behind the sleek, eponymous $1,000 cocktail robot, announced a new product called, appropriately enough, the Coaster. Simply put, the Coaster is a connected drink scale that pairs with the Barsys app to guide your pours.

Users input their available ingredients into the app, which then tells you what drinks you can make. Then set a glass or pitcher (or the Barsys Mixer) on the coaster and start making your drink. The lighted coaster changes color to indicate when to start and stop pouring each ingredient. The result, according to the company’s website, is “drinks taste exactly as they would at a cocktail bar in Manhattan.” Which, I assume, also means you can charge your guests $20 a pop.

Barsys is taking pre-orders for the Coaster now at $95 before it goes out to retail in December for $149.

The Coaster comes at a time when all manner of technologies are connecting your cocktail experience. The Perfect Drink cocktail scale doesn’t have a fancy light show, but it only costs $40 for the basic version and $100 for the Pro. And of course if pouring your own cocktail is too much work, you can always get a Bartesian countertop drink machine to make your drinks using flavor pods. Or if you really want to take it up a notch, wait for SirMixABot to show up for your party.

You Know You Want to Read a Story About a Cocktail Robot Called SirMixABot

It’s hard coming up with a name for a product. It has to be catchy, memorable, and ideally give you some kind of inkling as to what the product does. With that in mind, I’m going to go ahead and declare SirMixABot to be a Hall of Fame product name.

Aside from scratching any 90’s nostalgia itch, SirMixABot is a pretty fantastic name for a cocktail making robot. Load up to six bottles on the top and then use the built-in touchscreen (or accompanying app) to see all the drinks you can make. Set your glass in the machine and SirMixABot does the rest.

Sadly, you can’t get a SirMixABot at this time. The company had been selling DIY kits where you assemble the robot at home but the stopped making and shipping that version. As Brendan Stiffle, Co-Founder and CEO of SirMixABot told me by phone this week: “Selling DIY was great because it let us bootstrap [our] first iteration.” However, he went on to add that “the market is much larger when you have a plug-and-play unit.”

Plug-and-play is just a fancy way of saying Stiffle and Co. want to sell a straight up countertop device, no assembly required. To help with that endeavor, Stiffle, who is currently a student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, got SirMixABot into the MIT Delta V accelerator, which provided some funding as well as access to engineering resources at the school.

Stiffle’s plan is to roll out SirMixABots around Boston to discover and work through any issue before taking it out more broadly in 2020. The company is actually going after multiple target markets: home use, offices, and even event services. As such Stiffle wouldn’t provide any pricing information as it will change depending on whether someone is leasing it or buying the machine outright. FWIW, the DIY version of the six-bottle SirMixABot cost $499 plus shipping.

SirMixABot is stepping into a market that is already pretty crowded with established cocktail bots. Bartesian (made by Hamilton Beach) sells for $350, though that uses flavor pods to make drinks. The Barsys uses a similar bottle system as SirMixABot, but costs close to $1,000. DrinkWorks (a joint venture of Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch) is slowly rolling out its countertop drink maker, which also makes beer and cider, and costs $299. And of course, let we forget the MyBar, which you can buy assembled for $399 or as a DIY kit for $299.

Then there is also the issue of scaling production. Right now, SirMixABot is bootstrapped with six students and other part-timers working on the project. As we’ve seen from crowdfunded hardware projects that have gone bust, moving from a prototype to a full-on mass produced appliance is not easy. But Stiffle doesn’t seem daunted by the task. “Hardware is hard,” he said, but “it doesn’t scare us.” Students on the team will be graduating with in a year and after MIT the company will shift into fundraising mode.

We’ll have to check in on SirMixABot next year to see if Stiffle’s baby got greenbacks. (ed. note; SORRY!).

The Bartesian Home Cocktail Robot Will Ship in March

Sometimes a good cocktail takes a while to make.

And a good home cocktail robot? That can take almost half a decade to get things just right, at least if you’re Bartesian.

Of course, taking a long and circuitous route to market wasn’t originally part of the business plan for this Canadian startup. Like many companies who have initial Kickstarter success, Bartesian came out of the gate strong with plans to ship their hardware and capsule-based cocktail machine in a year. But, as is the case with so many Kickstarter hardware campaigners before and after, the original ship dates came and went as the company was hit with the hard reality of getting the product into production.

Over time, however, the company realized that their secret sauce – or rather, liqueurs, bitters and juices – was their capsule delivery system and not the robot itself. So last year,  the company decided to hand over manufacturing to an established housewares brand in Hamilton Beach as part of a three year manufacturing agreement.

“It was soul searching time” said Bartesian CEO Ryan Close last year when asked about the deal. According to Close, the company had to ask themselves, “Do we want to be an appliance company or a CPG company?” Eventually they decided to focus on the capsules after realizing doing both a replenishable and hardware would too difficult.

However, the decision to sign a manufacturing partner came only after the company had spent nearly three years working on getting a product ready to ship to Kickstarter backers. Because of this, the company made the interesting decision to hand assemble over 300 units and send them to their backers and – once manufacturing started – send the same backers an additional Bartesian when final production units were available.

“Our Kickstarter backers have been incredibly patient and supportive while we battled through the R&D and production of launching both innovative hardware and customized CPG’s,” said Close in a June 2018 interview with The Spoon. “They will each keep the KS unit, the retail version is an extra and all about gratitude for being with us from the start – extreme patience – and cheering us on from the sidelines.”

And so now in early 2019, the company is finally ready to ship production units to backers and into retail this March. According to Close, the retail price will be $299 and capsules, which are purchasable through the website, will go for $14 per six pack.

You can see the Spoon’s interview with Ryan Close at last week’s FoodTech Live @ CES below.

The Spoon Talks with Ryan Close of Bartesian (a home cocktail robot)

Wired’s Joe Ray Reviews The Spinzall And The Results Are Cloudy

Let’s get this out of the way: I love to read Joe Ray’s kitchen gadget reviews. Perhaps more than any modern cooking gadget reviewer, Ray not only keeps real-world consumer concerns front of mind as he evaluates new products, but he does so in a way that shows off a strong understanding of advanced culinary concepts all while explaining new technology in an approachable way.

And oh yeah: he’s funny too.

The result of this unique combination of skills makes his reviews a joy to read, and so when I saw he’d written a review of Dave Arnold’s new home centrifuge, I suspected it’d be the definitive wrap-up of this intriguing product.

I was right.

For those of you not familiar with Arnold or his newest contraption, here’s a quick catchup. Arnold himself is a modern day culinary renaissance man: part mad scientist, part award-winning food writer, part museum curator. In 2014, Arnold won the James Beard award for the book Liquid Intelligence, a Modernist Cuisine for the craft cocktail set, which added to an already sizable cult following from years of writing, podcasting and inventing interesting culinary hardware products.

So when Arnold announced his latest product, the Spinzall, there was understandably a lot of interest. The product is an $800 countertop centrifuge. While that price may be somewhat eye-popping, it’s a downright bargain compared to most high-end centrifuges which can cost thousands of dollars.

The excitement was also fed in part by Arnold’s emphasis on the use of centrifuges in Liquid Intelligence. Here at the Spoon we’ve been following the Spinzall’s journey to market, all the way back when Arnold first started pre-selling the device and through his crowdfunding efforts. We even had him on the podcast.

And now the Spinzall is finally shipping, which brings us to Ray’s review.

Ray begins his review in a way that reminds of how my wife reacts every time I bring home a new product: shoulder-shrugging indifference combined with bemusement at how excited I am for something that, for normal people, doesn’t seem all that life-changing:

NOT LONG AGO, I poured a bottle of fancy whipping cream into the gadget I was reviewing, started it up and watched in awe as the machine’s rotor began spinning rapidly, creating a vertical wall of solidified dairy that stayed in place after the machine wound down.

“Behold,” I exclaimed as my wife Elisabeth passed through the kitchen. “I made butter in a centrifuge!”

“Wow,” she said with a tone that foretold bubble bursting. “Did they run out of butter at the store?”

Before long, Ray rolls up his sleeves and jumps into the review with vigor. He makes two versions of a clarified lime juice recipe, one with the Spinzall and one with a method the same Dave Arnold wrote about in 2009 in which he said, “Not only do you not need a centrifuge, you don’t need the bag and you don’t need the vacuum.”

At the end of his lime juice journey, Ray found he got better results with Arnold’s 2009 non-centrifuge technique.

He then tried out making spreadable yogurt and flavored oil to decent but somewhat eventful results:

I made the labneh and spun up some basil oil, and they were tasty but the machine had a hiccup while I was making the oil where the lid rotated toward the open position while it was running. I couldn’t get it to open any further, but it no longer felt fully secure, which is disconcerting when the rotor below continued to spin away at 4,000 rpm.

In the end, Ray suggests Arnold’s centrifuge probably makes sense for bartenders and craft cocktail enthusiasts trying to take their art to the next-level, but the Spinzall didn’t seem worth it for someone without $800 and a surplus of counter space to spare:

The Spinzall certainly has some neat tricks up its sleeve. It might solve a problem or two for owners of small bars (a larger bar would need several machines) or make for good entertainment for food nerds who like to throw parties and have $800 to blow. For the most part, however, it’s hard to justify awarding it a space on your counter.

Go read Ray’s full review here. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Housewares 2017: Somabar Pushes Robo-Bartender Into Production

This week at Housewares I caught up with Somabar, a company that makes cocktail-mixing robots.

I talked to company CEO, Dylan Purcell Lowe, who told me they’ve started production of the company’s robot bartender, which won best of show for the appliance category at CES 2016.  The device, which you can preorder for $429, is now in the hands of beta testers. The company expects to start shipping new orders by fall of this year.

According to Purcell Lowe, interest in the Somabar has come from both the consumer and professional/enterprise markets. The device, which has enough capacity to serve up to 300 drinks, would work well in hotels or restaurants according says Purcell Lowe, which is why their next generation Somabar will come in two versions: one for consumer and one for the pro market.

You can check out my interview with Purcell Lowe above and watch a quick walk-through of the Somabar below via Instagram.

We checked out the Somabar robotic bartender at #ihhs2017. #futureofdrink #foodtech #robotics

A post shared by Smart Kitchen (@smartkitchensummit) on

(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.