DraughtPick, a home-grown app for beer lovers, is quietly gaining momentum by offering a way to curate each user’s preferences and guide them to their perfect brew.
“There are breweries everywhere these days, but finding a place that has what you like isn’t easy. You can’t go to Google and say, ‘find beers I like’,” says Mike Moore, CEO and co-founder.
The app, created by a Manchester startup founded in 2018 by Moore and COO Len Morrissey, focuses on what a user wants to drink, not just what others recommend. When a user creates an account, it will ask them to rate what they love, like and dislike. “There are lots of apps that can direct people to brews and breweries,” says Moore. “But what people need is an app that will connect them to something they like, regardless of whether someone else thinks it’s good.”
As Trish Moore, chief data officer and Mike’s wife, points out, some of the low ratings for beer might be coming from people that don’t even like it. “I don’t like porters, and if I get one in a flight and give it a thumbs down, the app is not going to tell the brewer it is a bad beer because it’s probably a really good beer, just not what I like,” she says.
Other apps are more like gatekeepers, says Mike. But DraughtPick uses a heavily weighted average focused on the user’s personal taste and ratings of people with similar taste. The recommendations are more meaningful as someone who likes that style of beer can better judge the quality, he adds.
Mike says breweries traditionally pay for listings on these platforms, as much as $800 annually, but with DraughtPick it is covered by token sales. So, while the basic app is free to users, they can opt to pay $3.99 month and get a monthly token for a free product at a brewery.
“The tokens help fill seats, and people will typically try more than the free item and order food as well,” says Mike.
Pictured: Top: Trish and Mike Moore. Middle: The DraughtPick app. Bottom: Mike Moore and Len Morrissey. (Courtesy photos)
Current Issue - May 2024