A new app called Next Glass is engineered to help uninformed drinkers make better decisions when buying beer and wine.
After downloading the app, users are asked to list some of their favorite wines or beers to create a “taste profile” based on the chemical composition of their selections. The next time users visit a liquor store or local wine merchant, they can scan a bottle to receive a personalized score from 0 to 100, gauging the likelihood that the libation in question will suit their palate.
Next Glass COO Trace Smith told ϳԹ that the company has figured out a way to “translate data into taste” and “learn what chemical compounds will hit your taste buds the right way.”
To augment their profile, Next Glass users are encouraged to rate each wine or beer they drink on the app’s star system. The more feedback the app receives, the better and more personalized its recommendations will be. As the Next Glass states:
It’s important for our algorithm to pick up both the compounds you like and dislike. Equally important (if you want to discover things outside of the usual) is to have a lot of diversity in the types of things you rate. For example, if you only rate IPAs and then go and scan a cider, we may need more insight before the scores are where we want them to be.
Next Glass eventually wants to include every beer and wine available to U.S. consumers in its database. At present, the database includes 20,000 types of wines and 11,000 varieties of beer.