Brewbarrel, a German startup also known as BrauFässchen, has come up with a way for people to brew their own, personal beer flavors — at home — in about a week.
Brewbarrel’s system lets customers choose their own flavor profiles via the website: You start with a basic beer type (lager, wheat beer, ale), select a level of hoppiness, and then pick additional flavors you want to add (lemon, honey, chili, etc.). The company says there are 30,000 different possible combinations of ingredients.
Once you’ve chosen a recipe, Brewbarrel ships a kit to you with the right mix of ingredients.
With its special homebrewing keg, you can prepare those ingredients in about 10 minutes, then let them ferment and be enjoying your own fresh beer in about a week — or one-third to one-fourth the time it typically takes with home brews.
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The proposition is attractive enough that Brewbarrel has already shipped 40,000 kits to customers in Germany, and the company says it is already self-sustaining on revenues. (It has received a small infusion of angel capital from an unnamed brewing ingredient supplier, but has otherwised not raised outside capital.)
Kickstarter kickoff
However, the company is starting a Kickstarter campaign today to help it expand internationally.
The Kickstarter campaign will enable Brewbarrel to automate its production: Right now, its team of 3 founders and 9 additional employees assemble each kit’s ingredients by hand, which is not particularly scalable. It will also help the company connect with partners to facilitate international logistics.
In addition to tapping into a growing surge of interest in DIY (do-it-yourself) projects, and humanity’s natural love of beer, Brewbarrel might also benefit from a growing interest in cooking at home — without all that boring shopping, annoying prep work, and nasty cleanup. Plated, Prep Cook, and FreshDish are among the companies angling to bring you ready-to-cook ingredients, while FreshDirect and Instacart (which just raised $44 million) deliver groceries, albeit not yet prepped for cooking.
There’s at least one other DIY homebrewing startup out there: Brewbot.io.
Brewbarrel hopes to raise $50,000 with its Kickstarter campaign.
“Screw it, just brew it”
Above: Brewbarrel founders Ping Lu, Wolfgang Westermeyer, and Dominik Guber.
The three cofounders, who all studied sciences at the Technical University of Munich, got into home brewing the way many people do: out of a desire to drink a beer that’s more distinctive than what they could buy off the shelf.
The result was similar to the way many homebrewers start: “We messed up our kitchens with malty equipment and drove our loved ones crazy with undrinkable beer,” said co-founder and chief product officer Wolfgang Westermeier, in a statement.
After much research, the team found a way to brew beer right in the keg. They use a special pressure valve that releases just the right amount of the CO2 produced by fermentation, while retaining just enough to carbonate the beer.
With the one-barrel process, the trio was able to further optimize their brew kits by selecting ingredients that would not produce undesirable tastes or brewing byproducts (which are otherwise eliminated by traditional, multi-step brews).
“We selected special yeasts and malts to provide the best fermentation conditions possible. This prevents the formation of unwanted by-products in the first place,” the company states in an FAQ.
It has adopted the motto “Screw it, just brew it” in many of its marketing materials.
Pricey personalization
The danger that Brewbarrel faces is that its kits are neither cheap enough to appeal to casual beer drinkers nor fussy enough to appeal to seasoned homebrewers.
But perhaps there’s a market for people who want to drink — and share — a beer they’ve helped create, yet they don’t want to go to too much trouble for that personal touch. And if that market is willing to pay, Brewbarrel could be in luck.
The mini-kegs hold 5 liters (about 10.5 one-pint glasses of beer, or 14 twelve-ounce beers) and, through Kickstarter, the kits will cost $55 each for traditional beer recipes or $65 for personalized recipes. That means you’ll be buying a fairly pricey set of beers, comparable to what you’d pay for a pint at the local pub.
But you’ll have the pleasure of bragging to your friends that your mango-bourbon-lemongrass dark beer is truly one of a kind.
