I’d never started out a day of shooting film with a beer, but there’s a first time for everything. At MiniBrew‘s canal-side office in the Dutch city of Utrecht, co-founder Olivier van Oord introduced me to their product and their ambitious plans for the future.
The company was founded in 2014, and found its way onto Indiegogo, where it picked up over $350,000 in funding. Their promise to bring simple craft brewing to people’s home had apparently worked, and it’s not hard to understand why – people love beer.
MiniBrew’s mission is bigger than producing a machine that automates most of the steps in the brewing process; they’re aiming to be a platform for beer brewing. Individuals and breweries alike can upload their best recipes for different types of beers to the platform, and MiniBrew owners all over the globe can download their favorites from there.
In practice, this means you could be traveling in Mexico, have a beer you really love, and instead of always whistfully looking back on that memory, just brew it at home. The platform not only sends over all the right ingredients you need, it also downloads the instructions on how the machine should use them.
As van Oord told me, brewing five liters of beers takes between five and fifteen days, depending on the type of beer you’re brewing, and doesn’t require more than filling the machine with water, grains, and hops, and hitting start.
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Currently MiniBrew devices are up for pre-order for €999 ($1194) on their site. The machines are expected to be shipped in the third quarter of 2018. Cheers.
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