Wine company Casella to ‘crowd brew’ its first beer
Wine company Casella is to produce its first beer, and is asking consumers to help it choose the ingredients.
The Perfect Lager Project, devised new agency AnalogFolk, is a campaign to ‘crowd brew’ the perfect Australian lager.
The first phase of the campaign is a ‘call to arms’ for beer drinkers to download an app to give feedback on every beer they drink. The data will be used to make a lager that will be on the market by June.
Cracker of an idea. Nice one Groges and team.
Nice idea. So nice it was done in 2005 …. by a mob called Brewtopia.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/virtua.....198845.htm
Nice concept, and a good little video, let’s hope it makes people appreciate beer a bit more.
But…. a couple of questions.
With all the beer style out there why limit yourself to Lager? If you were serious about evolution why not make a pale ale, or a stout or an IPA?
Also I don’t understand the timing. Lager (wose name comes for the German meaning to store) beer takes somewhere around 4-6 weeks to make, week or so in the fermenter, and at least 3 weeks of storage, probably more, as Crown Lager taught us ‘Time is the 5th ingredient’ (actually the fifth ingredient in Crown is Sugar, but that’s beside the point). So if it’s going to be in market by June, and it takes 4-6 weeks to make, and I’m guessing some time to transport to shops, and it’s currently the 20th of April how exactly are you going to have time to collect and collate all the results?
Also what is it will companies only doing iphone apps?
With Andriod user numbers rapidly growing (particularly amongst males) it seems shortsighted to exclude so many people from the campaign.
Superb question @ BeerGeek. Now for our geeky response.
Craft brewers adopt a 4-6 week process. Large manufacturers ferment for about 14 days followed by about 4 days maturation. We have the capability to ferment faster than this due to using cylindro-conical fermentation tanks and a low VDK (vicinal-di-ketone) yeast. As the data is already rolling in and we do not despatch until the first full week in June we have allocated ourselves time to develop.
Also, to answer your other question, love it or hate it, lager is still the biggest volume and value opportunity in beer. So we’re starting there.
BeerGeek, thanks for raising something that totally grinds my gears (and not talking about my preference for an ale over lager any day)
I also get annoyed by the side-stepping of Android users for most app launches.
Well said!
Thanks for the answer Perfect beer guy.
I note in another story I was reading about this (on Brews news) it stated that you where collecting data until the end of May. Given you are dispatching in the first (full) week of June you must have some super quick fermenters, given you would need to order things like malt, hops, yeast based on the crowd sourced data, probably test the recipe to make sure the crowd know what they are talking about, that sort of thing.
I also note from your website that you have found out such essential elements in beer recipe development as What day of the week people drink (Thursday), that we like to drink with two mates, and that it’s best to drink whilst watching sports, unfortauntely I note no one seems to know where they are when the drink.
I don’t mean to be cynical, but it does seem that perhaps you aren’t crowd surfing to create a beer at all. You are crowd surfing to create demand for a beer, which of course is fine, becuase that’s what we are here for.
Lager might be the most popular, but that’s because the market doesn’t in general have much of an idea.
So I guess you can follow in a crowded market – which is what you will do. Instead of leading a market which doesn’t have a lot of attention just yet, but is gaining it hugely overseas. Given the time Australia needs to latch on to anything, you could have been on top of the pile given that time needed.
Lazy really and lacking long term vision.