The NYC Daily Post interviewed Pubinno, a San Francisco-based company whose technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we enjoy draft beer. Our interview explores how Pubinno works and what it could mean for the future of draft beer consumption. We’ll look at its features, benefits and the issues it seeks to solve to determine whether its technology can truly provide an improved drinking experience.
Is Pubinno the future of draft beer? Let’s start with Pubinno’s journey from concept to reality.
Who is Can Algül and why did he create Pubinno?
Can Algul is the CEO and co-founder of Pubinno and a food tech enthusiast. He was born in Istanbul. During his years as a college student, he worked as a basketball coach and a bartender. This was when he saw the challenges and problems the industry faces. For example, he worked with a great number of draft beer systems used in bars/restaurants and thought there was a critical piece that had the potential to create great value but was missing: Integration and standardization of data technologies to draft beer systems.
Algul came up with the idea of creating the future of draft beer using AI, robotics and data technology to create solutions for the problems of the industry. Those issues include not being able to control the foam level and temperature of the beer, difficulty and time-consuming cleaning of the beer tap and identifying the cause of anomalies that lead to problems.
Not just his observations as a bartender helped him find solutions to the problems rooted in the industry. The experience he gained as a basketball coach of one of the biggest U18 teams in Europe contributed greatly to Pubinno’s culture, which creates a growing ecosystem where basketball culture has a profound impact.
Q: When was Pubinno founded?
Pubinno was founded in 2015 by Can Algul and Necdet Alpmen. At first, we were a small team with big dreams, and we grew into a dynamic one over time, trying to make a difference in every step. Our scale product Smart Tap 2 was launched in 2019. We put great emphasis to foster transparency and simplicity in our culture. It is crucial for us to center our work on quality and sustainability, as we strive for creating the perfect beer worldwide. We are self-driven team players, building revolutionary products for the beer industry with a deep care about our planet.
Q: Can you tell us more about Pubinno’s product family?
Yes. Pubinno’s end-to-end smart solutions create a fully connected digital ecosystem where draft beer operations are trackable, fully automated, and standardized. Our patented and AI-powered product family includes Smart Tap, Smart Clean and Smart Hub.
The Smart Tap is powered by our patented artificial intelligence and robotics system which controls the flow rate of beer and tracks all the parameters impacting the beer quality such as pressure, maintenance routine, temperature, keg freshness and more in order to deliver perfect beer taste regardless of time and location. Thanks to its advanced sensor technology, Pubinno’s Smart Tap provides real-time data about all these parameters.
The Smart Clean is a fully automated, AI-powered, and portable draft beer line cleaning system, that has been designed to cope with the chronic problems of the draft beer system. Thanks to our patented AquaVibra technology, the Smart Clean conducts a unique line cleaning process for each beer line depending on the usage, beer type, cooling system and line length for maximum quality with minimum resources.
The real-time data provided by the products is displayed on the Smart Hub, a data hub for Pubinno products offering a mobile application for our clients. The data also includes sector sales average, brand-based detailed insights, KPI tracking, time interval between the cleaning line process and keg efficiency.
Q: Can Pubinno help bar owners manage their stock and drink orders?
Pubinno creates a fully digitized and traceable system of draft beer with real-time data on consumer preferences such as the consumption of beer by each brand and the exact time and location of the consumption. This enables bar/restaurant owners to measure and track their sales anytime they want to from the Smart Hub and to make purchasing decisions according to the behavior of their customers. On average, Pubinno’s product family improves stakeholder’s profitability by providing the operations with real time data, periodic sales reports and dashboard insights. We have recently piloted a predictive sales module leveraging the past data related to the bar/restaurants including the weather, events, or activities near that could impact the sales.
Q: What does Pubinno technology monitor?
Our patented technology checks the temperature of the beer being poured from the tap, the flow rate of draft beer in the lines, and tracks all the quality parameters such as pressure, line cleaning, keg freshness, etc. to maintain the highest beer quality and consequently to deliver perfect beer taste regardless of time and location.
Q: Does Pubinno technology support the local economies where it is used? If so, how does it support the local communities?
Yes, Pubinno touches every step in the entire value chain from brewers, distributors, retailers to bartenders and many more. Because our Smart Tap improves keg efficiency, we create value for the whole supply chain and enable sustainable end-to-end operations.
For example, the bar/restaurant owners that use Pubinno’s products often say that without Pubinno, they wouldn’t have sold draft beer at all because our products provide a visible, trackable and digitized draft beer system.
The Smart Tap also helps bartenders deliver excellent customer service and multiple tasks easily during peak hours. The Smart Clean decreases the amount of time required to clean the beer lines properly from over 3 hours to 45 minutes and this helps the bar/restaurant to keep up and running. The Smart Clean also saves around 25% of water and 15% detergent used in conventional systems, improves the keg’s efficiency by around 2% and makes the beer line cleaning process more sustainable.
Most importantly, our smart technologies enable restaurant/bar owners and beer brands to reduce beer waste and increase operational efficiency, reducing carbon emissions typically caused by conventional ways of working.
For example, the Smart Clean helps avoid using more water, detergent, and the countless car drives taken by the cleaning personnel. To provide some numbers, Smart Clean eliminates 85% of human touch in the process and improves keg efficiency by 2%. Smart Tap improves the keg efficiency by an average of 20% and supports the beer brands’ sustainability goals with its environmentally friendly draft beer experience. Through the integration of technology into the conventional, inefficient systems, we take steps forward to create a net zero future for the industry.
Q: Can Pubinno’s technology allow crypto payments to pay for beer?
Pubinno accepted BTC payments using the Lightning Network at the #LightningHackdaysIST held from Feb. 25 to 27, 2022. By using their Lightning Network-supporting wallets, participants could receive their own beer, poured just seconds after scanning a QR code to complete the transaction. Now we don’t offer this service, but we have a module that can be enabled upon request.
Q: Does Pubinno have any plans to expand their operations into other markets or other types of alcohol?
Our main aim is to standardize and revolutionize the draft beer ecosystem. We recently added Japan to our portfolio in 2022 and now operate in five countries and 60 cities worldwide. During the second half of the fiscal year, we are focusing on expanding Pubinno products in New York since the U.S. is a huge market for Pubinno’s smart products. (In 2022, the U.S. was the second largest market for beer products and the industry had a revenue of 120 billion dollars.)
Q: Where can we find a bar that uses Pubinno technology?
Pubinno products now revolutionize the beer industry in 3 continents and more than 60 cities from Tokyo to Madrid. We also have another product called “Pubinno Selections” that helps beer lovers to find out the bars/restaurants where they can drink the perfect draft beer, the quality of which is measured by the industry standards. It is updated regularly by more than 10 parameters consisting of the perfect beer.
Q: What else can you tell us about Pubinno?
At Pubinno, our goal is to create a net zero future for the beer industry, touching every part of the value chain in the ecosystem. To do that, we put sustainability at the center of everything we create since the beer industry is very carbon-intensive, uses great amounts of resources and emits even greater amounts of greenhouse gas. So, there is a lot to talk about our efforts to a net zero future. For example, according to WWF and SABMiller’s report, 50 to 155 liters of water is used from farm to glass to produce one liter of beer; an average of 102.5 liters of water.
Since the first launch, over 54 million pints of perfect beer have been poured from Smart Taps. If this beer was sold with standard, conventional procedures, more than 657 million liters of water would have been lost. Our goal is to have saved 1 billion liters of water and reduce carbon footprint emission as much as possible for a better future by 2030 while establishing the Internet of Beer with all Pubinno products all over the world.
If you want to learn more about Pubinno, you can check out their website or watch an online video about their products.
Featured Image: Photo courtesy of Pubinno.
Editor’s note (1): To increase efficiency and leverage its technology, Pubinno’s AI Smart Taps would replace normal taps.
Editor’s note (2): This interview was conducted without offer or receipt of monetary remuneration or products. The NYC Daily Post prides itself in publishing citizen-driven, independent journalism in a transparent manner.