This App Scans Drink Labels and Makes Recommendations Based on Chemistry

Confirmed: I will drink a lot of this. (Courtesy of NextGlass)

Kurt Taylor, the founder of a sophisticated new booze recommendation app called NextGlass, likes to drink wine and beer. But, he says, he’s by no means an expert.

“I’m the guy that’s overwhelmed walking into a grocery store and trying to pick out a bottle of wine for my in-laws,” he told Yahoo Tech.

It’s for that exact reason that he invented NextGlass, what he claims is a foolproof, chemistry-backed method for ensuring that you’ll choose the right drink. The free Android and iOS app provides a Terminator-like seek-and-drink vision that can analyze how likely you are to enjoy a bottle of beer or wine based on your own personal tastes. As a result, you get to try new things without accidentally spending cash on a bottle (or box) of something you hate.

Sneak Peek of the Next Glass App from NextGlass on Vimeo.

Here’s how it works: When you open the app, you’ll be asked to rate a few beverages on a five-star scale. These will likely consist of well-known, diverse labels that even the uneducated booze drinker might recognize (if you happen not to know one, you can always skip to the next).

Completing this evaluation gives NextGlass’ intelligent software a good foundation to tailor recommendations based on your tastes. It will also make you thirsty.

You have heard of Veuve, no?

From then on, the first thing you’ll see when you open the app is a screen that uses your smartphone’s camera to immediately scan whatever label comes into its path. The scanning software isn’t necessarily advanced — you have to hold it face-on in front of a label in order for it to recognize the brand.

After a few seconds, a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 will pop up. This indicates how likely you are to like whatever it is in your hand.

If you’ve already rated the bottle yourself, the app will remind you of what you said (because, let’s face it, you might not remember that you’ve tried a particular beer before). If the rating is, say, below 75, you can put it back on the shelf and rest well, knowing you avoided catastrophe. Otherwise, you just found yourself a new drink order.

Tap the rating again, and you’ll learn some basic facts about the potent potable you’re about to put in your body: the number of calories, carbs, and alcohol by volume it contains.

You can also choose to tap a drink icon at the bottom of the screen that will recommend similar-tasting alternatives (some of which will likely cost less, to help you save money).

How exactly does NextGlass know the chemical combination and label of every single beer and wine in existence? It doesn’t, yet. But Taylor and his team — made of former finance types, not food scientists — have established an impressive and extensive database of modern beer and wine.

Adding a new alcoholic beverage to the NextGlass catalog means submitting it to an extensive survey of its chemical, historical, and aesthetic qualities. When NextGlass receives a bottle, employees take about 40 photos of it, ensuring that they get crisp images of the labels that their database needs to analyze. They take down all the information they can about that particular product: where it’s from, its level of alcohol concentration, how much it costs, whether it has a screw top or a cork, the composition of its label — the list goes on.

Once it’s undergone that superficial interrogation, the bottle heads to the NextGlass laboratory in North Carolina, where resident scientists prepare it to be run through a variety of analyses. The main one is on a device called a mass spectrometer. You may have heard of this on an episode of Law & Order: It’s a tool commonly used to analyze blood samples in crime labs but it also breaks apart and evaluates the chemical composition of any liquid.

Many vineyards and breweries use mass spectrometers to ensure that their batches have a consistent taste. NextGlass uses its to record about 20,000 data points. From there, it can further note certain elements that matter to your enjoyment — chemical compositions, for instance, that make a beer “hoppy” or a wine “dry,” and compare them with other drinks.

Data points from Firestone Walker Pivo Pilsner, Pilsner Urquell, and Budweiser, compared. (Courtesy of NextGlass)

“Data around wine and beer on the Internet right now is pretty dirty,” Taylor said. “We have a unique opportunity to touch every single bottle and build a really clean database. We’re taking advantage of that.”

Next Glass Lab Tour from Next Glass on Vimeo.

In the end, the company’s software — which Taylor says is “much more intelligent” than he is — factors in every element of the beverage in question, compares it to your past ratings, and makes a judgment call.

Obviously, Taylor has assigned his company a tremendous load of work. The contents of his comprehensive database have not quite reached the inventory list of my local wine shop. I tried the app on two of my regular red wines — Crosby Cabernet Sauvignon and Bacchus Pinot Noir — and it didn’t recognize their labels when I scanned them, or their names when I manually searched for them. Though I knew that this would not happen with every bottle I’ll enjoy in the future, it felt discouraging. If you go through the trouble of downloading an app like this one, you feel like you’re being cheated if it can’t take a certain title into consideration.

Not that NextGlass isn’t trying. Its lab can process only about 150 to 200 bottles a day. And over the past year and a half prior to its launch on Thursday, it’s processed 20,000 bottles. In the meantime, a traveling “beer census” truck has picked up another 8,000 different beers from local breweries around the country, which will soon become part of the database as well. Taylor’s hope is that eventually the database will be detailed enough to offer accurate predictions for anyone, whether they’re a clueless beginner or a seasoned expert. 

In fact, he’s even learned something about himself in the process.

“I’m not much of a white wine drinker,” he said. “But I have found a number of white wines that I actually enjoy.”

You can download the NextGlass app here for Android and here for iPhone.

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