The Next Glass App: Pandora for Beer!

You’re at a liquor store, staring down their enormous selection of craft beer trying to find a beer that you haven’t tried yet. As you search, you check each name and label looking for something that screams, “Drink me!”. However, once you find that beer of choice, your mind immediately wonders whether or not you will actually like it.

That’s where Next Glass comes in.

Next Glass is an app for your phone that will help you find your next perfect drink, or commonly referred to as the Pandora for beer. They accomplish this feat with 96 percent accuracy, according to Co-founder and COO Trace Smith, by breaking down the chemistry compound of each beer and comparing it to your Taste Profile.

After creating your account, Next Glass asks you to rate beers based on a 4-star system. They opted for a 4-star rating system because, according to their website, “in order to make accurate recommendations, we need people to fall on one side of the fence or the other with their rating. With 5-star scales, users will cluster toward the middle, three stars, which isn’t helpful to our recommendation algorithms.”

While you are drinking and rating beers, three employees at Next Glass are working around-the-clock testing the chemistry makeup of every beer they procure. Smith told me that they have an in-house laboratory where they use a liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which breaks down the thousands of compounds in each beer. Those data points are stored and then used to provide a Personal Score for every beer in the database.