New App Aims to Predict Your Next Favorite Beer
Soon, when you’re ordering a beer at a bar or restaurant, you won’t need to ask your bartender or server for a recommendation. Neither, when you’re scanning the store shelves in search of a six-pack perfectly suited to your taste, will you have to make a split-second decision based on label alone.
We’ve all had memorable instances when we’ve plunked down our hard-earned money for a beer that sounded cool but left us cold. But there’s a new free app in the works that will take the guesswork out of beer buying.
A Wilmington, N.C.-based company called Next Glass is currently putting in the legwork to scientifically map the DNA of every single kind of beer sold in the United States in order to scientifically determine — based on beer you’ve liked in the past — what beer you’re likely to enjoy next. The app’s tagline: “It used to be subjective. Now, it’s personal.”
“It really doesn’t matter if it’s a stout or an IPA because, if it has a similar DNA, I can guarantee you’re going to like it,” Next Glass spokesperson George Taylor recently told KOIN 6, in Portland, Ore.
In order to sniff out even the most-esoteric craft beers, the app maker has sent two of its employees on a cross-country beer-buying binge. These guys are snagging (though, alas for them, not tasting) as many different beers as they can find, in what the company is calling a Beer Census – loading them into a refrigerated truck and bringing them back for scientific analysis. They’re hoping to get every single bottled or canned beer sold in the United States: about 40,000 of them.
Once the beers’ DNA has been analyzed, “… if you give us, like, three to five suggestions on things you’ve tried, whether you liked them or not …,” Taylor told KOMO/WWAY/CNN, in Seattle, “we can tell you exactly what you are going to like.”
And you've got to like that.