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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

future of drink

Can You Make Hooch At Home? Not Yet. Here’s The State Of Home Distilling in 2017

If you want to create your own booze, I have good news for you: With home distilling kits widely available online and an abundance of of information about how to make liquor through books and websites, it’s easier than ever to make hooch at home.

But there’s still one problem for all you aspiring Jasper Newton Daniels out there: It’s a federal crime to distill liquor at home for personal consumption.

Of course, it shouldn’t be that way. At a time when millions of people make their own beer and wine and the legalization of pot in many states has also opened the door for people to grow their own cannabis, the federal law against home distilling seems like an antiquated holdover from the prohibition era. While the authorities point to the fact that these regulations have been put in place to protect consumers – it can be dangerous after all to make liquor at home without the proper precautions – most home distilling enthusiasts believe the real reason both the state and federal governments haven’t changed the law is fear of what such a change would have on the billions of dollars in tax revenue liquor sales generate every year across the country.

One only needs to look at the continued growth in demand for craft beer to realize this is a ridiculous argument. Not only has the craft beer industry exploded since home brewing was legalized in 1978, home production has also served as a training ground for many creative entrepreneurs who have helped reshape the craft beer and broader beer industry as a whole.

There have been signs of hope on the legislation front. Two years ago, a bill was brought up in Congress (H.R.2903) sponsored by Minnesota Congressman Erik Paulsen that would have legalized home distilling of liquor for personal consumption.  The bill, which spawned a similar bill in the Senate (S.1562), was called the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act of 2015 and was focused in large part on streamlining and reducing taxation of the burgeoning craft distillery market. Nestled in that bill was also a stipulation that would have made home distillation legal at the federal level.

While seeing fairly strong bipartisan support, both the House and Senate bills never made it out of committee. However, both the bills have been resurrected this year with the same sponsors of both the House and Senate, but the problem is both curiously left out the provisions for legalization of home distilling. Given the strong anti-legalization posture around marijuana coming from Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department, one has to wonder if the backers of these bills predicted strong headwinds against the legalization of home distilling under the Trump administration.

All of this ignores the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people that make their own spirits at home today. Home stills are legal to sell under the guise that people will make such concoctions as hop oils (which are legal), not spirits such as whiskey (currently illegal for home production). The reality is most people who buy home stills use them to make booze. The reason they can get away with it is local law enforcement have bigger fish to fry than chasing after home distillers (unless, of course, they sell their wares to others).

One possible route towards legalization in coming years could be at the state level. Missouri has already made it legal to make spirits at home, and given what we’ve seen in the cannabis world, there might be a movement towards doing so in spirits. There is also a push by home distilling interest groups to get language inserted in the current bills up for consideration to allow for home distillation, but so far there’s no sign that the sponsors of those bills will make any amendments.

Bottom line? If you want to make booze at home, you easily can, and soon there might even be innovation by some aspiring entrepreneurs to make doing so easier. Just make sure to tell anyone who asks that you’re making “essential oils”.

PicoBrew Debuts All-You-Can-Brew Subscriptions With New Lower-Priced HomeBrew Appliance

Today PicoBrew announced the latest addition to their connected homebrew appliance lineup, the Pico C, in a newly launched Kickstarter campaign. Alongside the lower-priced entry, the company also is debuting BrewUnlimited, an all-you-can-brew subscription service for $59 a month.

The newest Pico is a cost-reduced version of the Pico S, the original Pico model. By offering their new beer brewing appliance at $549 retail (and starting at $279 for Kickstarter backers), the company is looking to make the homebrewing more affordable to those who may have been curious about trying tech-enabled brewing but were unwilling to drop the $800 required with the previous generation. At these lower prices, chances are both existing home brewers who may have been reluctant to abandon their traditional methods and homebrew-curious newbees will be more likely to take the plunge.

In order to make the latest version of their homebrew appliance more affordable, the company made slight modifications such as replacing the all stainless steel exterior with a black powder-coated exterior and a slightly lower fidelity OLED screen.

Today the company is also introducing its first subscription service called BrewUnlimited. The service will cost $59 a month and will allow a Pico user to brew as many PicoPaks as they wish per month (with the only limit being the customer can have only two unbrewed PicoPaks at any given time).

In an interview, company CEO, Bill Mitchell told me the thinking behind the new all-you-can-brew plan.

“We’re committed to make sure people will see new PicoPaks they want to brew,” he said. According to Mitchell, the company is adding new PicoPaks based on recipes from craft brewers at a rate of five per week, and the BrewUnlimited plan will allow Pico users to explore these new beer recipes more freely.

“It’s like Netflix for beer,” said Mitchell.

As with any subscription plan, the individual user will need to do the math and see if they brew enough to make it worthwhile. Mitchell told me the typical Pico user brews two PicoPaks per month. With the typical PicoPak costing about $23-$25, the new subscription service makes sense for anyone who brews three times a month or more.

The BrewPulse App

With this announcement, the company is also adding its first mobile app. Called BrewPulse, the app will allow you to order new PicoPaks as well as monitor the progress of the brew. While much of the monitoring by the app is based on standard timelines for fermentation, the new app will be able to make more precise estimates of the fermentation curve progress if the homebrewer leaves the fermentation keg next to the new Pico. According to Mitchell, the Pico C has an ambient temperature sensor that will be able to help better predict progress. In short, higher temperature means faster fermentation.

The company is also introducing a newer, simpler brew keg. The Pico C keg, which unlike the older ball-lock kegs, is dishwasher safe. The newer keg, which is the same volume (1.75 gallons) as the old keg will have simplified connectors.  According to Mitchell, there will be conversion kits available for those with a Pico S so they can also use the Pico C keg.

Update: You can watch a video of the new Pico C Keg here.

Related: The Complete Pico Home Beer Brew Appliance Review

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Sous Vide Cocktails? Yes Please.

The French technique of cooking food slowly in a warm water bath is not new. In fact, sous vide has been around since the early 18th century. For a long time, it was reserved for exclusive and high-end cooking and remained relatively unknown in the consumer world.

In the last few years, however, it’s gone from being a well-known cooking technique in the hobbyist and professional chef communities to a being a food tech darling. Startups like ChefSteps, Anova and Nomiku have all worked to bring sous vide to the masses at affordable prices with recipes that feel accessible.

But whenever you hear about sous vide, whether in an online review or story or on a panel, you hear people talking about cooking steak. Fish. Chicken. Sometimes vegetables. But cocktails? Preparing the newest libation isn’t synonymous with a sous vide machine, but Tasting Table is profiling some chefs that are using the warm water bath technique to create some delicious concoctions.

So how do they do it – and why? A good cocktail has an array of vibrant flavors – from fruits to herbs and spices to fragrances, there’s a lot that goes into crafting the perfect drink. Sous vide can be an excellent way, it turns out, to infuse several flavors into a liquid in preparation for turning it into a cocktail later on.

One restaurant in Santa Monica, California that’s known for its beverage menu uses sous vide in several ways to create delicious liquid flavors to include in their drinks. Tasting Table explains the process,

“For his Rome with a View, he sous-vides a mixture of blood orange peels, blood orange juice, sugar and black pepper pods at 150 degrees for two hours; the sugar and the juice slowly draw oil out of the peel, which in turn infuse with the black pepper.”

The slow infusion of flavors into the liquid is what gives these bartenders the edge; it would be impossible to recreate that type of complexity just with muddling or shaking. Another bar in Brooklyn is using a variety of lemon flavors via a sous vide infusion to recreate a cocktail that probably comes with a stigma in hipster bars – the Cosmo.

Sous vide clearly isn’t going anywhere, and the creative ways to use the machine will only attract more curious home chefs who want to recreate delicious meals and drinks in their own kitchens.

To read about the rest of the delicious cocktails being cooked up with sous vide, check out the Tasting Table piece.

Housewares 2017: Behmor Dropping Price On Connected Brewer As It Rolls Out Alexa Integration

The Spoon is at the Housewares Show in Chicago this week and is stopping by some of the booths at the Smart Home Pavilion to see what the companies have brewing.

At my first stop I visited with Joe Behm, CEO of Behmor, a maker of high quality coffee brewers and roasters for specialty coffee connoisseurs.  Back in October, Behmor was the first coffee maker manufacturer to announce Alexa integration and, according to Behm, the Alexa integration will roll out in about 30 days.

Behm also disclosed some other news: the company expects to drop the price on their connected brewer from $299 to $199 from mid-April onward.

“That price point is going to change the dynamic,” said Behm. “Once you drop below $200, then they (the consumer) start to see the benefit.”  Behm explained that the Behmor Connected Brewer is the only certified “Gold Cup” connected brewing machine on the market today. Gold Cup certification is a designation overseen by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA).

In a way, Behm sees his connected coffee maker as having a similar benefit to that of sous vide circulators. Much like a sous vide circulator adds greater precision to the cooking process, he believes his connected brewer can more easily bring greater precision and control to the coffee brewing process by enabling the user to tailor the brew with the machine’s app that highlights the specific flavor notes and, by adjusting the brewing temperature slightly, creating different coffee profiles from the same coffee.

You can hear our interview with Behm by clicking play above.

Sudden Coffee Looks to Disrupt A $9.9 Billion Market

Instant coffee is not a celebrated food item. It’s cheap and convenient but that’s where the accolades end – which made a perfect challenge for entrepreneurs Kalle Freese and Joshua Zloof to tackle with their new startup. Sudden Coffee launched with the mission to find new ways and technologies that could make instant coffee better. Why?

Opportunity. Instant coffee is a $9.9 billion market according to a Research & Markets report released earlier this week. Instant coffee’s appeal is it’s accessibility to anyone. You only need a cup and some boiling water and you can enjoy a hot, caffeinated beverage. The problem is that dissolving powder into water does not produce anywhere near the same flavors and textures as traditional brewing methods.

So Freese, the 9th best barista in the world (no big deal) and Zloof, a food entrepreneur, set out to reinvent the process of making instant coffee grounds and creating a product that rivals even the best hipster coffee house brews.

TechCrunch talks with the founders (and does a taste test) about how exactly they plan to change the taste and quality of instant coffee. Their first not-so-secret tool is sourcing high-quality coffee beans to start. But then they work to ensure the extraction process doesn’t mess up the flavors of the beans, basically by using a cold(er) brewing method in a centrifugal system. This allows for a sweeter, less bitter brew. They then developed a unique freeze-dry technique that allows them to process lots of coffee at a time without compromising the end product.

TechCrunch’s taste test fell a little short of the promise, though it did outperform the standard instant coffee by a large margin but did not do the same with standard brew, according to the writer. The VCs who vetted and ultimately invested in Sudden had much more glowing things to say in their Medium post about the funding, supposedly testing it on friends and family with extremely positive results.

Sudden just closed on a $2.7 million round of funding in December 2016 led by CRV and was just accepted as the second-ever food brand allowed into the coveted Y Combinator startup accelerator. It seems the instant coffee market is indeed about to change, hopefully for the better.

Beer And Tech Get Cozy As Future Of Drink Heats Up

This morning I opened my email to see a new Product Hunt post from angel investor and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis about a new “Inside” newsletter he’s launching called Inside Beer. Calacanis has founded a couple of tech and startup based pubs, including Engadget and “This Week In Startups” along with LAUNCH but also started “Inside,” a series of industry-based vertical newsletters.

To date, Inside has tackled issues like security, San Francisco, venture capital, VR and AR so covering the latest news around beer feels a little off-brand. That is, unless you’re paying attention to what’s happening between tech and the beverage industry.

Says Calacanis,

“This may seem like a “fun” vertical for an Inside newsletter, but the reality is that beer is multi-billion dollar industry and many people – from restaurant folks to brewers to distributors – have a pressing, professional need to stay up on this news. Inside Beer provides it, in one email.”

Considering the emerging startups in the space and the partnerships between Big Beverage and tech to bring things like home brewing and the smart bar to the mainstream, we’re pretty sure 2017 is the year that tech starts to play a major role in the future creation and consumption of beer, wine and spirits. We’ll be watching the Inside Beer newsletter and the future of drink space closely.