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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cocktails

Bartesian Raises $20M Series A for its Countertop Cocktail Appliance

Bartesian, which makes a pod-based countertop cocktail appliance, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Cleveland Avenue, LLC, with participation from Stanley Ventures.

The Bartesian device has cannisters that you fill up with liquor such as tequila, vodka or rum, which it then mixes with a variety pods that contain different flavorings, juices and bitters. Place a glass underneath and push a button and Bartesian dispenses a perfectly mixed cocktail.

By next-gen kitchen appliance standards, Bartesian is a downright old timer. The product launched on Kickstarter back in 2015, where it raised more than $115,000. In 2018, Bartesian decided that it was in the drink business and not the hardware business and licensed manufacturing to Hamilton Beach. The first units started shipping to Kickstarter backers later that year and became more widely available at retail in December of 2019.

According to today’s funding announcement, the Bartesian system has served more than five million cocktails, experienced 975 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2020, and grew its subscriber base 30x compared to March 2020.

Without actual numbers, those stats aren’t super helpful in determining the actual success of Bartesian, and one has to wonder how much the pandemic helped boost interest and use in the Bartesian. With bars and restaurants closed and people relegated to their homes throughout much of last year, having a robot bartender like Bartesian on your counter made a lot of sense. With vaccination rates accelerating, bars and restaurants re-opening, and people being able to once again hangout in person, will consumers still want a home drink system?

Ryan Close, Founder and CEO of Bartesian told me by phone this week that while his company did get a COVID bump, it was already experiencing triple growth rates prior to the pandemic (they got off to a nice start by being an Oprah pick in the winter of 2019). Close said that the company has generated more sales in the first quarter of 2021, than it did during the first half of 2020.

The competitive landscape has also changed for Bartesian over the past couple of years. Drinkworks, which is a joint-venture between Keurig Dr Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and is also a pod-based drink machine, has been rolling out to different states across the country throughout the past year. And Barsys, which foresakes the pods for straight bottle attachments, is another option for the automated cocktail curious.

The one thing going for pod-based setups like Bartesian and Drinkworks, however, is the ability for people to have a full bar in their homes, without a collection of bottles taking up a lot of space. It’s much easier to store a bunch of flavor pods than a variety of juices, bitters and other drink ingredients. Plus, when people do have parties again, guests can easily make themselves a variety of cocktails with little to no mess.

With its new funding, Bartesian says that it will accelerate its growth domestically and internationally, scale up its production and expand its team. One of the investors, Stanley Ventures, is the venture arm of hardware company Stanley Black and Decker, which, Close said, is looking to bring Bartesian to Europe.

Bartesian also announced today actor Mila Kunis has joined the company’s board of advisors to provide guidance on brand strategy and growth.

Somabar Adapts to Pandemic, Adds Booze, Coffee and Juice to its Drink Menu

When I last checked in with Somabar at our Food Tech Live event in 2019, the company was making an eponymous automated drink dispenser that served up low-proof cocktails. The idea was that it could be used by bars and restaurants to create alcoholic cocktails without the need to get a full liquor license (think: Soju-based mixed drinks).

A lot Everything has changed since January 2019, including Somabar. Since the start of 2020 the company has been expanding the capabilities of the machine and positioning it as a more contactless way for restaurants, cafes, hotels and other hospitality locations to serve a wider variety of drinks around the clock.

“What SomaBar does, is it’s a professional mixologist of all things,” Somabar Co-Founder and CEO Christopher Hameetman told me by phone this week. “We’re now living in a world where we want to broaden our use.”

To that end, Somabar will now mix up just about any kind of cold drink you want. Low-proof cocktails, high-proof cocktails, cold brew coffee drinks, iced tea drinks, juices and, well, the list could go on.

The Somabar has six 750 ml and one 150 ml cannisters. Fill each cannister with whatever liquid you want: coffee concentrate, tequila, oat milk, orange juice — whatever. You then let the accompanying app know what you’ve loaded in each cannister. The app then tells you all the kinds of drinks you can make. Tap the button and voila! The Somabar dispenses your desire drink.

Or, don’t tap anything at all. The company has also added Siri and Alexa integrations to provide voice controls. Hameetman provided me a Zoom-based demo where he asked Alexa to mix him a drink, and while there was the occasional slight hiccup (which seems to come with any Alexa demo I’ve ever seen), it did work.

The idea with all this new functionality is to make Somabar more attractive in our modern, pandemic-stricken world. The expansions of Somabar’s drinks menu means that a restaurant could serve non-alcoholic drinks during the day (and to kids), and then swap out the canisters and serve boozey concoctions at night.

The voice-control features make Somabar part of the contactless 2.0 wave of restaurant tech, though I’m trying to figure out exactly how well voice control would work in a drinks scenario. You wouldn’t just have it out for anyone to use, because nowadays you can’t have lots of people putting their paws all over the same device. Having it behind a bar or counter seems too noisy for voice control and you would theoretically have only one person handling the cup, so they could presumably be the only person operating the app on a tablet.

Regardless, I could actually see the Somabar finding a place in restaurants, cafes and even small grocery stores/bodegas. The ability to make a wide variety of customized drinks throughout the day without needing to bring on a mixologist of some sort could prove very useful.

However, that versatility doesn’t come cheap. The Somabar is ~$4,800 (you can get a refurbished one for $2,800). The nice thing is — that’s it. There is no subscription for the software, so you get the drink library as part of that hefty price tag. And the open nature of the device means you can use your own ingredients instead of the pods that come with other automated drink machines like Drinkworks and Bartesian (though both of those are geared more towards consumers).

Somabar’s open nature could also help it further adapt, because 2020 isn’t done yet and a lot more everything could change.

The PicoBrew CaskForge is Like a Time Machine for Whiskey

When it comes to most types of food, the fresher the better.

Unless, of course, you’re talking whiskey or rum or any other type of spirit where aging is a key contributor to the flavor of the finished product. With the ‘good stuff’, the older the drink, generally the more valuable and desirable the product.

This business of aging spirits works well for established distillers who already have lots of their aged brew sitting in barrels and on store shelves, but for a new craft distiller of a spirit like whiskey or rum, chances are pretty good they’ll need to sell some of their non-aged white dog (also known as moonshine) spirit just to pay the bills.

But what if a distiller had a machine that could create many of the same flavor effects that come from putting your distillate into an oak barrel for years and years? Would they take it?

That’s the question PicoBrew is posing with their new CaskForge spirits aging technology. The company, which as I wrote last week is up for sale, has developed a technology that they claim can mimic esterification and other effects that result from the aging process a spirit undergoes and essentially produce basically the same magic elixir overnight.

Of course, there’s no doubt most master distillers and spirits snobs would turn up their ester-sniffing noses up at the very idea that a good bottle of scotch or whiskey could cheat time. But, over the past few years there has been a number of new entrants into the accelerated-aging market and PicoBrew’s CaskForge is just the latest.

Approaches to spirits aging run the gamut. One company called Terrassentia uses machines called “Rosies” to pump ultrasonic waves that they claim enhances the flavor profile.

Another company with aging-acceleration technology is Lost Spirits. Lost Spirits exposes spirits to varying light and heat within bioreactors to create simulated aged spirits in a matter of days.

Then there’s Cleveland, which uses a combination of exposure to wood staves and varying levels of pressure and oxygenation.

And Hudson makes bourbon by putting their distillate into small barrels (to get a better ratio of wood to liquid) and literally serenades the liquid with music to agitate the molecules as a way to accelerate the aging.

Jim and Bill Mitchell

So how does PicoBrew’s CaskForge do it? While the cofounder brothers of PicoBrew Bill and Jim Mitchell wouldn’t disclose the exact specifics (patents are still pending), they explained how they approached spirits aging in much the same way they did to creating their beer brewing appliance: they broke down every part of the process and used technology to simulate the various aging effects.

“It’s very similar to the way we invented the Zymatic and the whole process where we were able to shrink down the elements of a brewery,” said Bill Mitchell. “We took each element, asked how can we create that separately, and systemize it and see how we can sequence it in program steps.”

Ultimately it will be up to the market – and spirits experts with much more refined palates than myself – to decide if the CaskForge works to create a desirable facsimile of true aging effects, but a quick tasting tour at PicoBrew headquarters of rapid-aged spirits created by Jim Mitchell (PicoBrew’s chief science officer) showed promise.

Mitchell had me taste a mix of spirits, ranging from white dog (non-aged spirits bottled straight from the still) to a variety of rapid-aged whiskey and rum.

On the rum side, they had me taste a “flight” of Bacardi rum, going all the way from straight Bacardi Superior (the rum giant’s low-end, unaged white rum) up to the rapid-aged Bacardi equivalent of Bacardi 8.

Overall, the more “aged” the rum, the more complex the drink’s flavor characteristics. With all the the rapid-aged drinks they had me sample, it seemed the trademarks of aged spirits – heavier mouthfeel, flavor notes like vanilla, smokiness of peat when tasting accelerated whiskey/scotch – were all there. Granted, I’m no spirits sommelier, but the CaskForge-aged spirits seemed similar in taste and characteristics with beverages that sat in a barrel for years.

Ultimately the Mitchell brothers will need to convince master distillers, not a occasional sipper of whiskey like myself, that rapid aging really works. To do so, they’ve been reaching out to a number of craft distillers to talk about and show off the abilities of the CaskForge and some have begun to experiment with the technology.

The CaskForge system comes in both a professional version and a mini version meant for home cocktail enthusiasts or craft bartenders looking to take their creations next-level. In fact, PicoBrew believes craft cocktail makers themselves are a big potential market as they see drink artisans embracing the idea of creating specialty drinks with their own uniquely created base alcohol.

The CaskForge Mini

Of course, before all that happens, the company needs to navigate the process of receivership. As I wrote last week, PicoBrew has been put up for sale as an action forced by their bridge lending group, who hopes to take full ownership of the company through an open bidding process. It remains to be seen ultimately who will take ownership of PicoBrew and what they choose to invest in. Spirits aging is a growing business, but it’s a vastly different business than coffee or homebrew gear.

Bill and Jim both think they’ll get some takers, in part because of the smaller form factor and portability of their technology. Unlike other spirits-aging technologies, they believe their product is unique in part because it can go into smaller craft distilleries or even bars themselves rather than a centralized aging facility outfitted with bioreactors or spirits-aging robots.

I myself can envision craft cocktail nerds getting excited about aging their own liquor with specialty woods and flavors (Jim also had me taste a whiskey aged with coffee beans). If CaskForge or similar technology takes off, I can see an “aging” machine as another tool of the trade just like a strainer or even a centrifuge.

Let’s just hope the Mitchell brothers get their chance to get the CaskForge into the world and your favorite bartender a chance at making his or her own base liquor.

Robot Bartender Now Serving Drinks in Tokyo Train Station

Just when you thought Tokyo couldn’t get any more futuristic, the city’s subway system has a new robot bartender serving up drinks to commuters.

The Daily Mail reported this week that the Yoronotaki company has launched the Zeroken Robo Tavern in the Ikebukuro train station. The small pop-up opened on Jan. 23 and will run as a pilot to gauge customer reaction to the concept until March 19th.

The robot itself is just an articulating arm with an LED face. Customers enter their order via separate kiosk and then the robot whirrs into action, pouring out a beer in 40 seconds, or mixing up a cocktail for something a little stronger.

The robot is made by QBIT Robotics, which also built the Henn Na robot barista, also in Tokyo. The robot costs $82,000, which is evidently three years’ salary for an average bartender in Japan. Yoronotaki told the Daily Mail that labor shortages in Japan are part of the reason it is trying the robot out.

Japan has a greying population with more than one-third of its people over the age of 65. Many companies are working on robotic solutions to help stave off any potential labor crisis. Sony has teamed up with Carnegie-Mellon University to create food robots and has big ambitions for a robotic home cooking assistant. Connected Robots, which makes the takoyaki-cooking Octochef robot, raised raised a ¥850M ($7.8 million USD) last year to expand its food robot lineup. And in 2018, the Dawn Avatar cafe used robot servers that were operated remotely by people with disabilities.

Given how small the retail spaces in Japan can be, and the volume of people that travel Tokyo’s subway system, there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more robot bartenders pop up across Japan.

Food & Drink Pods Were Everywhere at CES, but Do Consumers Want Them?

If you were seeking out food tech at CES last week (and believe me, we were), you might have noticed an awful lot of one thing: pods. I was surprised by how many companies I saw demo-ing pod-based food or beverage system. Here are just a few:

Fresco’s olive oil press

Fresco
Tucked into the Italy pavilion at Eureka Park I stumbled across Fresco, the maker of a “Keurig of Olive Oil.” Insert frozen pods of olive oil into the EVA device (which is about the size of a French Press), press a button, and in five minutes you can collect your cold-pressed olive oil. You can select different varietals of olive oil and even choose infused flavors, like chili or basil.

When I saw this I instantly flashed back to the Juicero debacle — do you really need a device to thaw pods of frozen olive oil? According to the reps at the booth, though, you kind of do. The EVA heats olive oil to its ideal temperature, between 20 to 25 °C (77 °F), where you can taste all of its flavors.

The machine costs €79 ($87) and each frozen pod is around €1 ($1.11). For now only Italians can order Fresco, but the company is trying to move into the U.S. While Italian cucinares (cooks) might shell out extra euros to get optimally extracted olive oil, I’m not sure American home cooks will have the same level of devotion. Especially when they could just buy fancy olive oil from their local co-op or farmers market.

CES 2020: N2FALLS' portable nitro coffee

N2FALLS
You’ve probably heard of (or tasted) coffee pods, but nitro cold brew is a new entrant to the pod-based caffeine space. Korean company N2FALLS makes small cylindrical pods which, when inserted into the partner drink lid over a glass of water, expels compressed nitrogen-infused coffee concentrate. Voila — a nitro cold brew. Or if you do it over milk, a nitro latté! The company also makes pods for tea, juice and even booze-free wine.

Coffee prices vary by quantity but average to about $3 per capsule. For now N2FALLS is only available in Korea, but the company is in the midst of planning a U.S. expansion. Initially they’ll sell their pods in brick & mortar shops (the rep I spoke to named Amazon Go as a target) before selling online.

Tigoût
Argentinian startup Tigoût is a pod-based machine that bakes up wee single-serve desserts (think: Belgian chocolate cake or a white chocolate blondie). Insert a pre-prepped frozen pod (or two) into the machine, press start, and in a couple of minutes you’ll have a piping-hot sweet treat. Tigoût has a connected app so you can monitor your bake remotely and reorder capsules as needed.

The device itself costs $400 and each pod is $1.50. Right now there are 12 options, including six savory offerings. Tigoût’s founder and CEO Rodrigo Córdoba, who showed me the machine on the CES show floor, plans to launch the company officially in December of this year.

CES 2020: A Demo of Drinkworks, the Pod-based Cocktail Robot

Drinkworks + Bartesian
Adventurous CES goers could sample the hard stuff thanks to a few pod-based machines. Drinkworks and Bartesian are both cocktail-mixing robots which rely on flavor capsules to make classic drinks.

Drinkworks, which is the result of a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch, is a countertop appliance which turns pods into cocktails, ciders, and even beers. Just pop a capsule — which already contains alcohol — into the machine, press a button, and out comes your drink of choice. You can see it make me a Moscow Mule at CES in the video above (which, yes, I drank at 10am cause Vegas). Drinkworks is available in select states for $299 and the pods cost around $3.99 each, depending on the drink.

Like Drinkworks, Bartesian is also a pod-based cocktail robot. It uses capsules filled with juice, bitters and other mixers. However, unlike Drinkworks, however, Bartesian users have to provide the spirits themselves — which allows for more customization but also adds an extra step (and expense) to the process. Bartesian devices are currently available at retailers around the country (and online) for $349.99.

Pod people?
Clearly food & bev companies have seen the success of Keurig and Nespresso and decided that pods = the future. And there’s some validity to that. Pods offer near-instant gratification (assuming you remember to reorder them) and a high level of consistency. They also give consumers the option to switch things up according to their mood — if you want a hazelnut espresso one day and a vanilla one the next, no problemo — and provide hardware makers recurring revenues.

But while pods do allow some level of wiggle room, their very nature means that they still end up trapping consumers. You may be able to choose the flavor of your cold brew/dessert/cocktail pod, but you’re reliant on the pod itself to get the finished product — and that means you’re beholden to a specific appliance manufacturer. Consumers can chafe against being locked into food ecosystems. Pods also don’t give you wiggle room to tweak a recipe — for example, if you like a slightly less boozy cocktail or a sweeter cold brew.

There’s also the negative environmental aspect to consider. While some pods are technically recyclable, most end up in landfills. That could become a bigger issue as consumers begin to prioritize sustainability more and more.

Despite their obvious convenience, will the cost of pods — both literal and environmental — keep consumers away? Clearly a bunch of companies at CES don’t think so. But I’m not so sure that the pod-volution of food and drink will take off — especially for more niche products, like olive oil.

Instead, I think we’ll see a growth of smart devices like the Picobrew, which can work with the company’s Picopacks or let consumers add their own ingredients. Even Keurig is getting on-board. You can buy the company’s proprietary pods, but many machines also let you buy reusable pods and add your own coffee for more of a customizable and waste-free twist. The DIY aspect still keeps consumers within the hardware device’s ecosystem, but allows them more flexibility (and sustainability). That’s the type of tech I’d like to see more of at CES 2021.

Bartesian, a Home Cocktail Robot, is Now on Sale in Over 250 Retail Locations

If you’re still looking for that holiday gift for the cocktail fanatic in your life who has everything, you might want to run down to Best Buy (or Dillards or Bed Bath & Beyond) and pick up a Bartesian.

That’s because over the past few months, the home cocktail robot has started to roll out across the U.S. at a number of different retailers. According to company CEO Ryan Close, the Bartesian is now available at over 250 retail locations across the nation, including Best Buy, Bloomingdales, Beth Bath and Beyond, and Dillards.

The Bartesian, which makes a variety of cocktails using a proprietary capsule system to add in bitters, fruit juice and other mixers to the user-provided spirits, started shipping online earlier this year. According to Close, retail has always been part of the plan.

“5 years (!) of talking about one day being on the shelves of #BedBathandBeyond …here it is,” wrote Close on Linkedin announcing the company’s latest retail rollout.

Bartesian CEO Ryan Close at Bed Bath & Beyond

Close told me via Linkedin that while the company is launching its product in different locations across the U.S., they are primarily focused on higher-density markets like New York, Chicago and cities in California, to maximize awareness.

I’m curious to see how the Bartesian performs at retail. One potential sticking point for consumers is the need to buy capsules from Bartesian to make cocktails with the machine. The capsules, which include fresh ingredients such as fruit juice, are not cheap, selling in packs of six for $15. That’s about two and a half bucks per drink (before alcohol), which is certainly cheaper than a bar but pretty spendy for home cocktails.

However, while consumers have shown a reluctance to use proprietary pod systems outside of coffee, Bartesian isn’t the only company betting that home-based cocktails might be the next market to break open new capsule category. Drinkworks, the joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch, has rolled out to select markets in the U.S. Unlike the Bartesian, however, Drinkworks pods include alcohol.

The Bartesian, which launched over five years ago on Kickstarter, now faces a more crowded market than when it first launched. In addition to Drinkworks, Barsys has begun to ship its second generation bartender bot while newer upstarts like MyBar and SirMixaBot (best name ever) have started to make their way to market.

Review: MyBar.io is a DIY Mixed Drink Robot with Decidedly Mixed Results

Happiness comes from setting proper expectations, so if you want to spend $299 for the DIY MyBar.io robot cocktail maker, you should expect that it will be (pretty) easy to build, frustratingly hard to set up, but will ultimately work as promised.

Before any review of MyBar can begin, it’s important to know that this is basically the side hustle of one guy, Juan Pablo Risso. He’s an IoT engineer by day, and does pretty much everything for the MyBar by himself: designs, assembles and ships the kits, and even answers customer service questions. In short, this is not the same experience as buying a fully-formed product constructed by a venture-backed company. You just need to know what you’re getting into.

Ordering the MyBar was easy and the kit arrived as promised. The company says it should only take 2 hours to assemble, but I think that’s for DIY enthusiasts who already know what they are doing. I am not, and did not, so it took me more like 6 hours.

In my defense, it wasn’t just my own technical shortcomings. The online guide was incomplete, skipping entire steps (like adding the LED light), or not specifying that the flathead screwdriver required was for tiny parts on circuit boards, not regular screws. Additionally — and this is another danger of buying DIY products that aren’t fully tested before they ship — the first circuit board I got was faulty. Some of the terminal screws also would not tighten so wires would pop out.

To his credit, however, Risso was very responsive to my frustrated weekend emails, responding to every one, and even replacing my circuit board.

Those issues notwithstanding, the MyBar was pretty straightforward to build. It’s the housing, wiring 9 pumps to the circuit board, and attaching a bunch of tubes. It looks a little Frankenstein-y, but overall, the hardware is solid.

While the machine itself is solid, the software side needs a lot of work. The app is Android only, and I installed and ran it on an Amazon Fire HD 7 tablet. To be fair, the HD 7 is all of $50, so it is not the snappiest of tablets, but using the MyBar app was excruciating.

Ideally, you assign each tube a liquid (tube 1 = vodka, 2 = rum, 3 = grapefruit juice, etc.) in the app. The app then knows what ingredients you have and presents you with a list of drinks you can make. Tap a drink and the corresponding pumps spit out precise amounts of booze and mixers into your cup.

But the software is rigid and buggy. It works best if you can just use the pre-defined bottles already in the app: tequila, rum, grapefruit juice. There’s a UPC scanner in the app to ideally add any bottle of booze, but it didn’t work for any bottle I tried. Plus when you add a bottle, you have to fill out every line in the app’s form before it will be accepted. That means you have to add a UPC code (which I just wound up making up) as well as an image of the product. It’s very clunky.

Once built, setting up the MyBar to make drinks just takes. a. long. time. Too much time. And even when I successfully added ingredients, it only presented one cocktail recipe, so I had to manually create more. I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but adding those recipes was the second biggest frustration with the product because the workflow is not well designed, takes too much time and was just very amateurish.

I say “second” biggest, because my biggest frustration with the product was the wireless bluetooth connection to actually talk with the MyBar itself. Perhaps it was because I chose a cheap tablet, but unless it was literally right next to the MyBar, it lost its connection. This would then freeze and crash the app, forcing me to re-start. Multiple times.

We threw a party over the weekend, and I spent a good hour prior just trying to get the MyBar to work. In my mind, I had already started writing a scathing review of the product. Yeah, it was relatively easy to build, but it was far too onerous to set up. It didn’t work as promised. The app sucked. The wireless connection sucked. Everything sucked and I was ready to chuck it all in the trash when something happened.

It worked (You can see the video of it in action below).

Not only that, it kept working and worked throughout my entire party and what I thought would just be a novelty for people to point at and then ignore actually became a fun way for partygoers to get their own drinks. They liked MyBar and enjoyed (and marveled at, if I’m honest) the experience of tapping a button on a tablet and that drink magically appearing out of the machine.

And these party people weren’t rubes, many of them worked in tech and were still surprised and fascinated by the MyBar. To be fair, no one asked how they could get one, but that didn’t stop them from coming back throughout the night. I had to re-think my review because though it was a pain in the @$$ to set up, it ultimately did what it was supposed to do, and it delighted people while doing it.

My experience may have been less-than-stellar, but the end users loved it. I had to re-write my mental review.

I can’t say you should run out and purchase the MyBar, especially if you are not a DIY person and are frustrated easily. But I also can’t say you shouldn’t buy one, especially if you have some patience, a little technical know-how, and want an easy way to serve cocktails at your parties.

The advantage of the MyBar is that it’s a third of the price of the high-end, fully automated Barsys, and the cocktail recipes come straight from your bottles, not flavor pods like the similarly priced Bartesian (so you can do more customizing).

If you go into MyBar with these expectations, the happiness of your guests might just make you happy.

MyBar.io in Action

Build Your Own Home Robot Bartender for Under $300 with MyBar.io

We’re in the midst of planning a summer party at our house (the theme is yacht rock), and while I love throwing parties, I’m not a fan of the mess left after an evening of making cocktails. Between people sloppily pouring booze and mixers, it’s a sticky pain to clean up.

Which is why I’m tempted by Mybar.io DIY robot bartender. It’s basically a box that houses up to 9 pumps and tubes as well as some circuitry. You can order one for $299 if you build it yourself, or $399 if you order it fully assembled.

If you buy the kit, there’s an online guide to walk you through how to build it. Once set up, you download the app (Android only, because those tablets are cheaper), place the tubes in your selected bottles, and assign them to a pump via the app (e.g. vodka is pump one, orange juice is pump 2, etc.). Once you have all of your pumps labeled, the app takes stock of what booze and mixers you have and automatically generates a list of drinks you can make. Pick a drink and tap the button and the DIY Bar dispenses your cocktail.

I spoke with Mybar.io Founder Juan Pablo Risso, who told me that he is decidedly going after the DIY market right now. The company debuted the robot bartender at the Maker Faire last month in Portland, OR, and in keeping with that DIY spirit, everything about DIY Bar is open source. You can download the plans for the hardware and the circuit board, as well as the software and firmware from the company’s Github repository.

Right now, Mybar is a side gig for Risso, whose day job is working on IoT for Samsung. Mybar is bootstrapped and Risso said that he’s sold about 50 units since so far.

Risso and Co. are facing some stiff (drinks) competition in the home bartending appliance space. Bartesian (manufactured by Hamilton-Beach) is a Keurig-like countertop cocktail device that also sells for $299 (no assembly required). And on the higher end, Barsys offers a sleek drink making machine, but it will set you back more than $1,000. Which particular cocktail robot you want to buy probably depends on how much work you want to put into your machine, and how much flexibility you want in your mixology.

I just don’t want to spend all my time at my next party making drinks. Perhaps Mybar’s DIY robot is in my future.

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.

Raise a Glass for the New Robot Bartender in Prague

The sitcom, Cheers, probably would have been a lot less funny if the role of Sam the bartender had been played by an robotic, drink-pouring arm. I mean, sure, it can serve up glasses of chablis, but it probably can’t yell out “NORM!”

Reuters reports there’s a new robotic cocktail slinger in town, and it probably doesn’t know your name. At the Cyberdog cafe, which just opened in Prague this week, you aren’t clamoring among throngs of people, trying to get the attention of a disinterested bartender to order your drink. Instead, you place your order via a mobile phone app, and BUDY, an orange, articulating robot arm whirrs to life grabbing and opening bottles of wine, pouring them out and then loading the completed order on to a service tray, which travels overhead on rails before descending so you can pick up your drinks.


(h/t to The Washington Post for the tweet)

Robotic bartenders aren’t new. The Tipsy Robot bar in Las Vegas (of course) has been making robo-cocktails since July 2017, and at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe, FoodPairing’s robo-bartendar whipped up personalized boozy concoctions. Not to mention the home robo-bartending appliances hitting the market like Somabar and Bartesian.

Foodpairing powers this robot bartender from The Spoon on Vimeo.

Having worked at a bar, I can see why robots would be a bar owner’s best friend. They pour out precise amounts of liquor (no over-pouring), don’t call in sick and don’t steal from the till. Having patronized many a bar though, it seems like there is something lacking when a bar lacks humans. Bartenders are often funny, great conversationalists, and authentic sources of local information when traveling.

Cyberdog’s robot bartender may be a novelty now, but like its drink pouring robo-cousins Briggo and Cafe X (which just added iced drinks to its menu this week), the tireless, automated robotic precision will become common in high-traffic areas like airports, stadiums and anywhere else people want to grab a drink quickly, and faster service is something a lot of people would “cheers” for.

Ripple PM Prints a Selfie on your Cocktails

We are all used to the idea of Instagramming our cocktails, but the new Ripple Maker PM, made by Ripples, lets you place your Instagram-worthy photos directly on the foam of your favorite boozy beverage.

To customize a cocktail, users upload selfies, logos, or other images to the WiFi-enabled appliance using a Facebook Messenger app. From there, it takes the Ripple PM about ten seconds to “print” a greyscale version of the image using a malt extract directly on top of a beer head or frothy drink like a Pisco Sour.

Shipping now, the Ripple PM is actually a re-jiggered version of an earlier device, now known as the Ripple AM, which uses coffee extract to print customized images on coffee foam. (Get it? AM for the morning drinks, PM for the evening.) Changes to the PM include a better seat for cocktail glasses and a different drainage system. In addition to the AM and PM, Ripples also makes a Beer Ripple for all the lagerheads out there.

“The product is a platform that allows hospitality and food and beverage to use froth of their beverage as a new canvas of communications for their customers,” Ripples CEO Yossi Meshulam told me during an interview.

The Ripple PM itself costs $3,000. Print packages for the malt extract are $1,500 a year, which includes software and the first 6,000 prints (coffee print packages are $1,200/year). In addition to uploading photos directly to the machine, Ripples has a creative studio that regularly updates an online image catalog of downloadable content for printing.

Meshulam said that depending on what is being printed, a malt extract cartridge should last three to four days of heavy use before needing to be replaced. Similar to modern inkjet printers, the Ripple PM knows when it’s running out of extract and will proactively re-order cartridges for you.

While it’s not aimed at the consumer market, this is another good example of the many ways technology is enabling more customization and personalization of what we consume. It may not be as fancy as having your face 3D printed in chocolate, but it’s a little less gruesome to sip your selfie than bite your own head off.

Bartesian Ships to Kickstarters this Week, Backers Will Get Two Machines

Bartesian, the startup behind the eponymous automatic countertop cocktail making appliance, gave The Spoon a heads up that it will be shipping its first batch of devices to Kickstarter backers this week.

The fact that a crowdfunded consumer hardware product is actually making it to market is enough cause for celebration. But Bartesian backers will be able to raise more than one celebratory glass when they receive their robot bartender; the startup revealed that they will eventually be getting two Bartesian machines.

Wait. What?

Evidently the Bartesians that backers will shortly receive are being considered “beta units.” But fear not, backers! It looks as though you are not getting a knock-off, hurriedly constructed out of balsa wood and chewing gum. Here’s an email exchange I had with Bartesian Co-Founder and CEO, Ryan Close, that explains this unusual situation:

The Spoon: You’re shipping to Kickstarter backers this week. To all Kickstarter backers? Or just early birds?

Ryan Close: Yes, all KS backers this week.

You said you were treating these shipments as “beta units” — what will be the difference between these and production models?

These KS units have been hand assembled in Canada by our team. The retail units will be made in a top tier factory in China that makes other premium appliances. The handle on these KS/Beta units is not as intuitive as it needs to be, so we have already re-engineered it for the retail version coming out in Winter/18. The handle is a big change as it’s the #1 touch point for the consumer. We also made a few design tweaks to decrease the amount of pressure required to pierce the capsule, further increasing the ease of use. The new machine will look generally the same as the KS unit. If necessary, we can also make any design changes we uncover after our KS folks have had a chance to use our product. We’ll harness their input and implement any changes they feel would improve the overall experience.

You said Kickstarter folks will receive a free unit from Hamilton Beach this winter. So will people who receive the beta units ship those betas back to you to receive the full production unit? How will that work exactly?

Our KS 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. 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.

For a little more background, earlier this year Bartesian entered into an exclusive, three-year manufacturing and distribution agreement with Hamilton Beach. The move, according to Close at the time, would leverage Hamilton Beach’s massive manufacturing expertise and distribution network and allow Bartesian to focus on the drinks that come out of the machine.

Or if you’re one of its backers, both of your machines.