Binary Beer joins the Helium Network to help craft beer brewers accurately track and monitor inventory to enable digital transformation across the draught beer industry!
The craft beer market has boomed in recent years as brewers constantly try to concoct the next great IPA or pilsner. In fact, craft beer sales are forecasted to reach US$87 billion by the end of 2022 and US$174 billion by 2032. With this growing demand for quality beer, brewers need to be able to accurately monitor and have visibility into their beers when they leave the brewery, to ensure freshness, quality, and location of kegs and taps. Binary Beer was started with the goal of connecting brewers to their kegs, and more importantly their beer, in trade. With the help of the Helium Network’s extensive coverage and low-cost, brewers around the world will soon be able to ensure their products are being properly enjoyed by beer drinkers everywhere.
Building the IoB (Internet of Beer)
Binary Beer founder and CEO Michael Burton formed the company in 2016, when his background in computer science and engineering, and passion for home brewing, started him on a journey to ensure craft brewers were able to have fresh beer on taps in venues.
Burton soon realized that some of the largest breweries in the world were unable to see where their kegs were and how much of their beer venues really held. When kegs leave a brewery warehouse, stewardship of those kegs is entrusted to downstream parties with limited motivation to return them in a timely manner. This means that kegs can sometimes be left sitting for months or even years, leading to many of them lost through misplacement and theft. Additionally, brewers need to be able to monitor a number of different metrics and conduct quality assurance checks for their products, including:
Who’s drinking what. Brewers need to be able to see which venues have which beers, and ensure that those venues are either fully stocked with their preferred beers or that kegs are in transit.
Freshness. Brewers’ reputations are attached to their products. If a customer is served a stale beer at a venue, that customer will be left with a bad taste in their mouth (pun intended) from that brewery and will likely tell their friends.
Keg levels. Brewers need to be able to monitor keg levels at venues, helping to reduce waste, streamline production, and protect tap contracts by ensuring stock never runs out.
With that in mind, Burton founded Binary Beer with the goal of developing IoT solutions that would lead to a world filled with smart kegs of craft beer. The company’s patented KegLink™ technologies leverage geolocation solutions to solve the data disconnect between mobile kegs and the cloud, becoming the missing key that unlocks the data on which the Internet of Beer can be built.
KegLink™ sensors were created specifically for the draught beer industry, taking into account the harsh conditions a keg endures once it leaves a warehouse, as evidenced by this video:
In addition to being able to handle the roughest conditions, the sensors are extremely simple and quick for brewers to install on their kegs:
Untapped Potential with Helium
The Network’s wide-ranging coverage allows Burton’s vision to scale quickly, without having to rely on telcos or other providers to deploy hardware. Additionally, the low data rates associated with using the Network allow Binary Beer to offer competitive low-cost, secure solutions to their clients.
Burton and his team also praised the Helium Network’s rapid growth of coverage (currently at 778K Hotspots in over 172 countries, with more than 83K Hotspots onboarded in the last 30 days), proven end-to-end encryption, and reliable developer support. This has enabled Binary Beer to quickly roll out pilots and develop partnerships with brewers across Australia, Europe, and North America, despite the COVID-impacted past few years having seen a drop in the amount of craft beer being distributed. In addition to these pilots, Binary Beer already has sensors deployed at breweries in Canada, ensuring their customers are getting the freshest suds possible.
High Hops for the Future
In the craft beer brewing lifecycle, over 40% of energy used happens after the beer leaves the brewery. As brewers everywhere work to reduce their carbon footprint, they simply cannot afford to ignore the downstream logistics. The Binary Beer platform is one of the only platforms in the world that can give brewers real insights into the energy usage of each keg, and the team is chugging along to leverage the power of the Helium Network to provide these solutions for brewers worldwide.
To learn more about Binary Beer’s story and products, visit www.binarybeer.io or follow the company on social media on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and stay tuned for future updates.