Discover what the beer industry hides through AR Brew and Hops
AR Brew is a mobile application born from the union of four passions: collections, travel, technology and beers. These last two are the central axis of the application which resolves the need to have at hand and in one place the record of the largest possible number of beers from different countries; Well, travelers like us know that it is a challenge to easily find beers that are not in the big platforms or supermarkets.
It all started around the year 2015 during a trip touring the United States from San Francisco, California to Miami, Florida by bus, where at each new stop there was the opportunity to taste local beers, at that moment the idea and goal of trying as many beers as possible from around the world and making a photographic record of them was born.
To date, we have tasted and photographically recorded more than 1,000 beers from 42 countries, of which we have visited 35. This, thanks to different journeys we have had the opportunity to do as digital nomads traveling through Central and South America, Asia, Europe and Australia.
Due to the technological curiosity that characterizes us at Press Start, in 2019 we carried out a first test to verify if a standard label such as that of the traditional Colombian beer Águila could be read by the augmented reality software we had been developing in the company, to show the information on the screen. At the Australian Ballistic brewery in Brisbane, we decided to do a test with the complete Ballistic Pale beer information where we saw our idea start to come to life.
The next test carried out was to explore if we could make a database in the cloud, which would allow us to process photos of beer labels to be read by the augmented reality application in real time. The result was positive, which is why we moved towards registering the beers photographed, focusing on Uruguayan beers, especially those from Punta del Este where some people from the Press Start team are currently living; As it happens, it is a place not only with paradisiacal beaches, an excellent quality of life, but also with a wide variety of breweries and craft beers.
The next step we took was to approach local breweries and e-commerce platforms focused on the beer industry, speeding up the registration of beers and breweries in the app and achieving an important alliance with the HOPS platform (“Discover and buy craft beer”), whose mission is to provide technology to the buying and selling experiences of this product in LATAM, both online and in bars.
Today, Hops is working to offer a unified purchasing process by uniting its platform, official retail stores and bars, with modern, immediate and easy-to-use payment methods. This in order to create a comprehensive digital environment around beer consumption by implementing QR codes in associated bars and breweries, which allows them to connect customers with establishments, thus generating a new sales channel with access to VIP promotions and streamlining the experience. to receive your beer. In addition to this, they have a gamification layer with their Hops points, which promote and stimulate commercial synergy between the associated brewing actors.
Finally, the breweries that decide to associate with this platform will be able to access the following benefits:
Sell and promote their beers through Hops at a low cost and in a simple and convenient way.
Retain their active customers by sending notifications to their followers about new releases.
Participate, free of charge in promotional campaigns of the app and its partners.
If you want to know the complete list of benefits, visit the following link: https://hops.uy/revista/novedades/como-carga-hops/#cerveceria
If you want to know more about AR Brew and download the app visit this link
