Gary Tickle is the managing director of SBT and, as a native Australian, had found his way to the subject of beer early on. But it was to take some time before a drink for cozy evenings with family and friends was to become the work for a revolutionary invention called „BrewVo“. The basic idea behind the technology is to be able to break beer down into its constituent parts and later reassemble them as desired. For example, any beer can be served with a higher, lower or no alcohol content. Or ingredients present on site, such as water, can be skipped during transport, saving a lot of energy and money. Even storage is much easier – instead of barrels, simple cuboid cartons containing the respective parts of the beer are now sufficient. Sounds like science fiction? Deschutes has tested it and Gary explains it in BierTalk…

Link für Apple/iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/biertalk/id1505720750

Link für Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FWgPXstFr1zR9Fm2G0UJS

Zusammenfassung auf Deutsch:

Gary Tickle, ursprünglich aus Australien, hat eine lebenslange Verbindung zum Bier und wurde durch die innovative Arbeit von SBT zum Thema Bier neu inspiriert.

SBT hat eine revolutionäre Technologie namens „BrewVo“ entwickelt, die Bier in seine Bestandteile zerlegt und später nach Wunsch wieder zusammensetzt. Dies ermöglicht die Herstellung von Bier mit unterschiedlichem, niedrigerem oder keinem Alkoholgehalt und spart Energie und Geld bei Transport und Lagerung. Die Technologie trennt Alkohol und Wasser vom Bier und reduziert es auf ein Sechstel seiner normalen Dichte, wodurch ein sogenanntes Multi-Brewed Bier entsteht.

Neben BrewVo hat SBT auch NexDraft entwickelt, eine Zapftechnologie, die Multi-Brewed Bier in seiner dichten Form in einem Beutel erhält und es in Echtzeit in frisches Fassbier zurückverwandelt. Diese Systeme arbeiten zusammen, um Bier effizienter und umweltfreundlicher zu transportieren.

Interessanterweise wurde während der Entwicklung festgestellt, dass das Multi-Brewed Bier standardmäßig ein erstklassiges alkoholfreies Bier ergibt. Diese Entdeckung war zufällig, da die Technologie für alle Bierarten gedacht war. Das System ermöglicht es, das gleiche Bier in verschiedenen Alkoholstärken anzubieten, indem es alles in Echtzeit mischt.

Ein Beispiel für die Anwendung dieser Technologie ist Deschutes Brewery, eine der Top-10-Craft-Brauereien in den USA, die erfolgreich eine alkoholfreie Version ihres Flaggschiff-Bieres Black Butte Porter mit BrewVo hergestellt hat.

SBT arbeitet auch daran, diese Technologie auf andere fermentierte Getränke wie Wein auszuweiten und sieht darin ein großes Potenzial für die Zukunft. Sie sind zuversichtlich, dass diese Technologie dazu beitragen wird, die Craft-Bierindustrie nachhaltig zu verändern und zu erweitern, indem sie neue Verbraucher anzieht und den Konsum steigert​.

 

Interviewtext:

Markus Raupach: Hello and welcome to another episode of our podcast BierTalk. Today, again, we cross the Atlantic Ocean and we go to the United States to Golden, Colorado, and meet a new friend of mine, Gary Tickle, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Sustainable Beverage Technologies. So a complicated word for a German guy, but it was very interesting to meet you at your booth and to see all your inventions. And so I’m very happy to have you here. And maybe you introduce yourself a little to our listeners. Hi, Gary.

Gary Tickle: Hi. Thanks, Markus. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And to make it easy for our listeners, we just refer to ourselves as SBT, it’s much easier to pronounce for everybody. It’s much shorter too. So yeah, I’m the CEO of SBT. I’ve been with a company about two and a half years now. And my background was originally in CPG. But we can talk a little bit more about that as we go along.

Markus Raupach: Yeah, fantastic. So as I said, wonderful to have you here. And maybe first, a little bit to get to know you in person a little bit better. So what about you and beer? Is this a long-term relationship? Or more or less short-term? Or what is your preference around beers?

Gary Tickle: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, I’m originally from Australia. And I would say it’s a birthright in Australia to have a connection with beer. I think that’s just part of our culture growing up that beer had strong regional dimensions to it. You were aligned to a beer which really spoke to who you were and where you came from, which state you belonged to. So right from the very early days, I can think of spending evenings with my parents and friends at little beer gardens out in the country where I grew up. And beer was just an integral part of society and social gatherings and connectivity, frankly, in the community. So I guess I have a very early fond memory of beer in a positive light and how it played a part in my upbringing. In a responsible way, but in a very, very close community setting. And fast forward to today, in between, I started working with a global CPG food company and travelled the world working for them in New Zealand, then in South Asia, based in India, and in Switzerland, before coming to the US. And so my reconnection with beer came relatively recently, and in the last two and a half years where I was very intrigued by the work that SBT was doing. The founder and inventor of this technology is Patrick Tutera, a very smart guy, has a very interesting background himself, which we can talk about more. But when he realized he didn’t want to be the CEO of this company, he came looking for someone who did want to ultimately run the business alongside him. And I was super intrigued from really from a consumer standpoint, Markus about what’s happening in this industry, and where it’s going. Because that’s been my life has been studying in the consumer and understanding what it means for the future of your business. And I could see beer was ready for change. And I could see SBT presented a really unique opportunity to bring about that change in a very disruptive way.

Markus Raupach: Yes, a lot of changes, a lot of new approaches to beer itself, and also to the idea of a non-alcoholic beer and to serving beer or whatever. We will talk about that in a minute. So it’s a really huge change, possibly. So sustainability always is also a very important thing. And I think together with beer, that’s like a perfect match. So maybe our listeners have no idea what the invention is about. So maybe if you bring us a little bit like you would do a documentary, you would start it, and so what is, if it starts with a brewery having a beer wanting to bring it to the customer. So what is the difference if we use your new idea?

Gary Tickle: Yes, so maybe Markus, I’ll tell my documentary story through the lens of Patrick Tutera the founder because I think it’s interesting to understand how we got to where we are today. And it started with him as a keen hiker, backpacker, outdoors guy reaching the top of a mountain one day, I think in Utah and realizing that he would love to have a cold beer up there. But it’s a heck of a mission to carry a lot of beer up a mountain when the majority of it is you’re just carrying water.

Markus Raupach: Yes.

Gary Tickle: And his fundamental thought was, well, there’s got to be a way of doing this without having to carry all this water but still enjoy a great beer. And that idea played on his mind for some time before he eventually got around to starting in his garage in Alaska, where he was based at the time, tinkering around with the idea of how to separate, essentially take water out of beer and then being able to reconstitute the beer at a future point in time, which obviously introduces a lot of interesting possibilities for sustainability in the transport. So fast forward that to today, that idea has become now a large-scale technology platform patented processes. And there are two essential platforms, Markus, for any brewery. The first platform is what we call BrewVo. BrewVo is a technology which is installed inside an existing brewery. It relies on existing brewing processes. So it’s totally receiving a standard beer from a brewer, it’s then processing that beer and separating out the water and alcohol and shrinking the beer down to one-sixth it’s normal density to produce what’s known as Multi-Brewed beer. And that Multi-Brewed beer in its 6x dense form now has an ABV of less than 3%. So it is, had the majority of the alcohol taken out and the vast majority of the water taken out. And that Multi-Brewed beer is now available to do many things with. So if we just pause there, and go to the other platform, which is called NexDraft. NexDraft is a tap technology that can receive that Multi-Brewed beer in its 6x dense form in a bag and box, so no keg, and can reconstitute the beer back into fresh draft beer in real time on the tap system, so in your normal taproom environment and produce a great fresh draft beer. So you have this connection at this ecosystem whereby the 6x dense liquid is travelling through the supply chain with a fraction of the water that you would normally be shipping. Beer is typically somewhere in the order of 90-plus per cent water. And so when you think about the logistics of moving beer today, it’s predominantly moving stainless steel and water in keg format one way and then of course, you’ve got to return those keg. So you’re shipping stainless steel and air in the opposite direction, and then going through a whole water and chemical treatment process to clean those kegs. So there’s a lot of carbon footprint there tied up with the movement of draft beer kegs. So in this case, with these two technologies working together, BrewVo can produce a 6x dense liquid, can be put into a bag and box format, shipped through the supply chain, and then received at the other end and plugged into the NexDraft system, and pour it as fresh draft beer. And importantly, that technology can be connected to existing tap systems. It doesn’t require you to start again and rip all of your taps out. It connects to your existing tap lines and feeds them fresh draft beer. So that’s the two core technology platforms and we can talk more detail about what else they offer. But in essence, that’s the two platforms we offer at SBT.

Markus Raupach: Wow, that sounds too good to be true. But to say, to be honest, we tried it at the booth. So I know, I saw it, so it’s really real. And just to get a little bit into it. So you have the beer, and then it’s separated into three parts. So one part is pure alcohol?

Gary Tickle: Yes, so the way it works, Markus, is when we put the beer through BrewVo, we split the beer out. I always think of beer in three parts as all the good stuff, which is everything in the fermentables that you’re building in the grain bill, alcohol and water. So we strip out the alcohol and water, we separate them as one permeate. So the water and alcohol comes out together in a form such that it’s right about a 6% ABV permeate. It just looks like clear water. If you were to look at it, you’d say it’s a glass of water. But in fact, when you taste it, you realize it is alcohol in that water, but that creates a very interesting side stream from the process where it’s perfect base to make hard seltzers from it. You literally just have to carbonate it and add a flavouring base, fruit base or whatever you want to add and you’ve created a more based hard seltzer. And so what remains in a Multi-Brewed beer is that all the good things that you want to keep in the beer.

Markus Raupach: So we have the water and alcohol part and then the rest is, it’s like a still liquid but very sticky substance where it’s …

Gary Tickle: No, it’s not even very sticky, Markus. It has a very similar viscosity, slightly more viscous, obviously than a normal beer. But pours pretty easily, but obviously it’s now, it’s very much a flavour and aroma-dense liquid and it’s a perfect base then just to reconstitute in real-time. And what we learned along the way, really by chance, actually, it was quite serendipitous that having some master brewers who were in our facility tasting beers made from our NexDraft system, they asked us just to pour the beers without adding any alcohol back. We can talk a bit about that in a minute. And that’s how we came to find that actually, this Multi-Brewed beer produces, by default, best-in-class non-alcoholic beer. And it really was by chance. Because the technology platforms were designed to be for all beer. So Markus, when you think about that 6x dense liquid, Multi-Brewed beer travelling through the supply chain in a bag and box, it has with it a sidecar and an additional bag. And in that bag can be different levels of ethanol, or it could be just distilled water. With the intention of being that when you plug the bag and box into the NexDraft system, you can be pouring beer at different alcohol strengths, because it’s literally blending everything together in real-time. So you have the Multi-Brewed beer, you have the sidecar of ethanol, and you have water, of course, all being blended and carbonated in real-time. So we can have the situation as we do from time to time in our headquarters on our tap system, we have the same beer being poured as non-alcoholic session strength and full strength side by side on three taps. And it’s all happening with real-time blending.

Markus Raupach: Wow. So okay, so if we stay in the image, we have like the concentrate, and then we have the water and the alcohol. And first, those are together, and then you also extract the alcohol from the water or does this stay together?

Gary Tickle: No, we keep them together, Markus. I mean, obviously you could distil it down. I mean, that’s a possibility. But it is ready to go as a hard seltzer base. So it’s a ready-made solution and it means you have a very water-efficient process. If we just talk about brewing as a process it will be well known to brewers that it takes a lot of water to make beer. And so in this particular case, if you have the opportunity to use that water, then you really have got to a best-in-class water solution. Because now you’re using the sidestream that’s coming from the Multi-Brewed beer, you’re repurposing that as a base for hard seltzer, and any remaining water you can actually use to clean through the BrewVo unit. So it actually makes a very water-efficient process inside the brewery.

Markus Raupach: Yes. And I don’t know if you can answer the question. But I’m just curious, how do you convince the aromas to leave the alcohol and stay in the concentrate?

Gary Tickle: Yes. So this is really, this is where the magic happens. You would know, Markus, there are many different approaches technically to removing alcohol from beer.

Markus Raupach: Yes.

Gary Tickle: And I typically call them alcohol-stripping processes. They are designed where you brew a beer upfront in the brewery, and you try and guess or estimate what you’re going to lose in the stripping process to retain whatever you get at the end of the process. And you hope that you retain a lot in the stripping process. But the truth is, as you know, beer is a fairly sensitive, delicate product. It doesn’t like to be manipulated, it doesn’t like to be mechanically changed or chemically changed. And so these stripping processes generally have telltale signs in the finished beer. You can tell, I’m sure you can as someone who’s very educated in beer, that when you taste the beers, you can generally tell what technology made that NA beer by virtue of what’s missing from the beer, or what’s present in the beer that shouldn’t really be there. And so this is always the fundamental challenge. We say that making non-alcoholic beer is much harder than just making beer. Because you’re trying to remove the alcohol very gently, and at the same time retain all of those key characteristics that make the beer a great tasting experience, right? Which is ultimately what matters most. So this patented process, which obviously we can’t go into all the trade secrets, but this is where the magic happens. The design that Patrick has built around the technology and the process because it’s not just the physical piece of equipment, it’s also how we would train you to use that physical piece of equipment in such a way that you finish the beer fully with a ferment cycle. We call it Multi-Brewed beer because we literally brew a beer inside a beer. And I know I’m speaking in riddles, but this is how the technology works. And at the end of the day, it means you end up with a fully fermented and finished beer with all the aromatics and mouthfeel, and the key properties that really make the beer a great drinking experience, retained in the beer. And in the meantime, the alcohol has left the scene. So this is the key to the technology that we say, we say this, not jokingly, we say this, at SBT we really all hate making beer. We hate making beer with a passion. We only like making great beer, because at the end of the day, that’s what the consumer wants and that’s what will bring them back to non-alcoholic beer. And I think today, this is why for me, it was such an interesting opportunity to come and work with SBT is clearly this is where we can satisfy the consumer, we can bring them something new and differentiated, higher quality, and I genuinely believe this is what will help sustain the craft brewing industry into the future. It will bring new consumers into the category and it’ll expand consumption because they’re going to have a great drinking experience.

Markus Raupach: Yeah. And you can adjust the alcohol content however you like. That’s a fantastic idea. Yeah.

Gary Tickle: Correct. Yes. And the NexDraft system, you can do that, you can even do it in the brewing process. Because once you’ve got that Multi-Brewed beer and its 6x dense form, mathematically when you do the dilution down five parts to one, you obviously end up with a beer that’s less than 0.5% ABV. But it’s technically possible to add back malt-based ethanol at the time of canning. So, and we’ve done this. You can have the same beer canned as in NA, some as a session strength and some as a higher strength beer by the amount of ethanol you choose to add back at the time of canning. So you can even do real-time blending of the same beer into different products. That’s just another feature and advantage of how the technology works.

Markus Raupach: Yes, it’s like breaking the beer in its pieces and then put the pieces together however you like and maybe add other ones.

Gary Tickle: Correct. Yes, yes. And that’s work that’s ongoing. The other thing it lends it to, and we’ve done this as well, Markus, is we’ve made beer in Denver, Colorado and we’ve shipped that Multi-Brewed beer in totes, large totes, 275, 280 gallon totes, shipped them across the country to the east coast where another brewer just put it in a bright tank, blended, carbonated and packed it locally. So instead of sending 3000 cases of beer right across the country, we just sent five totes of beer in a small truck and they finished the beer locally. So it’s a hub and spoke model opportunity. So what I also appreciate about this technology is it opens up market access in a very unique way. There’s no reason why we couldn’t ship that same beer in tote form to Germany, and have someone can and pack it locally, as opposed to sending thousands of cases of beer in cans.

Markus Raupach: Yeah, no chance of oxidation and whatever happens to be.

Gary Tickle: No, and not shipping the water all the way across the Atlantic just to have it packed locally.

Markus Raupach: So that it’s really a revolutionary idea. And just a question. When you have like a pub and you get this beer from your brewery, so you get like a box and in the box are the two liquids? Or just the concentrate?

Gary Tickle: Yeah, so this is where the supply chain piece obviously in the US if you know the US market, it’s quite a unique market because it’s really, it’s a federal system, but state-run. And so the laws around how things move through the supply chain actually vary a little bit from state to state. But let’s talk generically, the supply chain is no different than it is for beer. An existing beer distributor can receive the bag and box, the two bags will be side by side, one will have Multi-Brewed beer, the other one will have malt-based ethanol in it. They will travel in their, what we call their individual box to the marketplace, and then if you’ve got a NexDraft tap system, all you do is literally clip the beer into the bag, clip the bag onto the NexDraft system. It’s a five-second job to click it in. And then it immediately recognizes which beer it’s pouring and starts pouring that on the NexDraft system. So yeah, it’s a very simple solution. And when you think about it, one-sixth still, which is the equivalent of call it 45 to 48 pints of servable beer, is a 13-pound bag. You can hold it in one hand. So if you think about just moving around six filled kegs today and the size and dimensions of it, you can literally just pick up the bag with one hand and that’s the same equivalent in terms of servable pints of beer.

Markus Raupach: Yeah, and it’s like a cube so it’s much easier to store. So that’s really, of course, very helpful.

Gary Tickle: Yeah, the other. Yes, and the other interesting feature Markus, is we can freeze the beer. When it’s in its 6x dense form in those bags for the NexDraft system, we can actually put the beer to sleep. We can put it in a deep freezer and freeze it. And we have a customer today in Bogota, Colombia who has our NexDraft system. They have it in their retail environment, and they’re pouring fresh craft beer that’s been made in Denver, Colorado. And what we do is we make the beer, we bag it, and we freeze it. We send them a frozen pellet of beer and they literally just put it in a freezer. And as they need the beer, they just take it out, give it 24 hours to come up to temperature, and then they just clip it in and pour it as fresh craft beer. And the challenges of shelf life of keg beer is, after 90 to 100 days, the keg is finished. But in this case, we have beers that they’re pouring as fresh craft beer that are up to a year old that have just been put to sleep. And they just wake the beer up when they need it.

Markus Raupach: And the only thing you have to have at your bar is the NexDraft system, and carbonation and water?

Gary Tickle: Yes, so the NexDraft system. And we’re very fortunate now we have Middleby, which is a publicly listed company here in the US who is now a strategic partner with us, they’ve invested in us. And they will be our global partner for the selling and distribution of the NexDraft system. They’re also a technical partner in developing the next generation of this unit. But the idea is that we would simply come to anybody who has an interest in adopting this technology. They purchase a NexDraft system, it will hook into their existing tap lines. So they don’t have to change the taps themselves, that stays as is. So if you’re like above the bar, the consumer knows no different. They would not know where the beer is coming from. But the NexDraft system will have a self-contained housing that can receive the bags and it’ll have what we call a small back room package, which does the real-time receival of the local water, filtration, chilling and carbonation of that water to blend in with the beer in real-time. And for the consumer experiences, it’s just another draft beer on tap. It just happens to be a great NA beer on tap that tastes like any other great beer.

Markus Raupach: It really sounds like rocket science to me. Did you ever tried to do it also with other beverages? So like like whiskey or milk or something like that?

Gary Tickle: At this stage, it lends itself primarily to be ideal for fermented beverages. The other area of endeavour we’re working on is wine. Because we look around, we’ve successfully done it with alcoholic ciders. We’ve de-alkalized ciders and made a great NA cider product, which again, theoretically, you could do a blend back at any level and additive. So same idea. But we think wine is a very interesting area, because my experience and those of us who’ve done a little bit of research in this area, we don’t really find any great NA wine. And we recognize it’s tougher because the ethanol makes up a bigger proportion of the consumable experience. And so that’s the first thing to consider. But also, it seems that the technologies today being used to de-alkalize are taking a lot of the character of the wines away. And they’ve come up as, it’s a long way short of a wine experience. So this is definitely a field of endeavour for us. We think we can do a better job with that. And that’s a very interesting expandable market in its own right.

Markus Raupach: Well, yes, that’s totally right. I think NA wine is a huge field and they are still struggling. I also didn’t have any good one at the moment.

Gary Tickle: I’ve tried. I’ve tried a lot, but I haven’t really found one that I’d say I would come back for. And this is the key, I think, Markus, for any of these products is you want repeatable expandable consumption. You don’t just want trial. And here I can give you a real-world experience of vero what we did with Deschutes. Deschutes, a well-known top 10 craft brewery here in the US out of Bend, Oregon. We did some initial development work with them on a beer, on an Irish stout, which was very successful. And then they came back and challenged us and said, well, if you really think you guys are good at this, we’re going to really put you the test. We’re going to give you our flagship beer, which is Black Butte Porter, and we want to see if you can make an NA version of this good enough that we would be willing to put our brand on it and call it Lite Butte. Not just call it a beer, but actually call it by its name, our flagship brand. And so we did that work. We were extremely proud of the product that we made at the other end. They were delighted with it. It subsequently went on to be a winner, the Best of Craft Beer Awards in Oregon and ultimately, what the real experience is for them is where that product is available on the shelf alongside all of their core alcoholic products today, it’s their highest velocity SKU, which is really interesting. It’s expandable consumption and it’s bringing back, I think, it’s bringing back loyalists who may have drank maybe five of those beers when they were in their 20s, and now they’re in the 40s and 50s and they’re drinking less of it. But now they have the chance to drink one full strength and a whole case of NA version and still feel like the drinking great Black Butte NA, which I think is where it’s really interesting for the industry.

Markus Raupach: Yeah. So that would have been my next question. So is there already a real-life experience of that? So Deschutes is really a big number to tell about that. So do you have any other experiences are already using the technology?

Gary Tickle: Yes. So just to conclude on the Deschutes experience, they have chosen to adopt the technology and it’s now public information. So by the end of this year, they will have a BrewVo unit under their own roof and they will be manufacturing for themselves and looking to expand obviously, the availability of the NA version of their beers. Peter Skrbek the CEO of Deschutes, he’s, I think quite a visionary leader and fully understands that this really can be a game changer. Because we’re not frightened to make analogues of existing alcoholic beers. We’re not frightened to challenged with give us a great NA, a great alcoholic beer that you make, and we’ll make the equivalent. We do it for Tommyknocker who’s based in up in Colorado not too far from us in Idaho Springs. They have a really interesting product. It’s a blood orange IPA in alcoholic form, which is a big seller for them. It’s a very unique beer, very aromatic, strong notes of blood orange. And they challenged us to make the NA version of that, which we’ve done. And it does extremely well for them. And again, as you can appreciate, that’s a tough beer to make. To retain always aromatics, to bring that rich flavour through. It’s doing very well for them. We also work with Groovy. Groovy is based out of Denver, Colorado. They’re an NA-only company. So they do NA beer and NA wine. And Groovy challenged us to make Groovy Golden, which is a very simple light American lager. And I’d argue the toughest beer to make, Markus because you really don’t have any complex things going on in the beer to hide behind. If the beer comes up short, you’re going to know immediately when you taste it. So I would argue the toughest beer to make. And so we made Groovy Golden for them. And the history now is that in 2022, we had two entries in the best, in the World Beer Cup in the NA category and it was Groovy Golden and Black Butte Porter. And Groovy Golden won gold and Black Butte Porter won silver. So it’s telling that very, very different beers, very, very different stylistically, and yet we demonstrated BrewVo has a breadth of capability to produce great beers in both cases.

Markus Raupach: Unfortunately, I was not at the table. I didn’t have any non-alcoholic beer and I was at the World Beer Cup this year. But I will try it when I’m back in the US. And so it’s really, it’s fascinating. And I’m still not sure what is the better part of it. So of course, the NA capability is fantastic and it’s new and it’s a new market, and there’s a lot of way to go. But on the other side, the idea to reduce transport, transport cost, carbon footprint, all these things, because at the moment, we have huge problems to import, for example, the typical US craft beers into Europe. We simply don’t get them anymore. So like the Sierra Nevada, like the Anchor Brewings or whatever. So it’s really hard to get these beers and if there is new ways to make that much more simple, that of course could also solve a lot of problems. So and I’m really curious. So maybe one last question on the process. Is it, does it have any impact where the aroma comes from? So no matter if it’s a hop aroma, a malt aroma, a yeast aroma, all these aromas have the same ability to be in the concentrate and to stay there and to be re-diluted afterwards?

Gary Tickle: Yeah, the short answer is yes, Markus. And again, because we do a Multi-Brewed process, it’s really interesting that we can actually use different yeast strains at different times in the total process. And, again, without going deep into the secrets of how we do that, it means that we can keep the characteristics of some of the maybe very exotic yeast strains that are something that you ultimately identify with and you want in the final product, we can introduce that quite late in the process to ensure that, in fact, you do get a good representation of them. And in terms of aroma, we have some very sophisticated processes by which we can introduce some very hoppy notes that are a key characteristics of, obviously, the IPA market is very big in the US, it’s quite dominant here in the craft industry. So it’s key to be able to demonstrate that you can retain those key characteristics of the beer to be able to call it an IPA. And I would say, the blood orange IPA, for example, is a very clear demonstration that we’re able to do that, and very faithfully represent a product. It’s a very hoppy beer with a strong blood-orange overtone. Those things, if you’ve got a typical alcohol stripping process, competitive technology, it’s really tough to retain all of that. It’s really tough to demonstrate all that in the beer, but we can.

Markus Raupach: So and the very last question that means if I have a brewery, and I produce just my normal beer and I have this BrewVo system, I produce my beer normally with my normal equipment and afterwards, put it in the BrewVo? Or I brew with BrewVo and I have to make new recipes or to bring that in it?

Gary Tickle: No. So it’s the former. You have your existing brewhouse, you’re brewing beers the traditional way. We will give you some guidance on how to actually simplify some of that brewing process. So we have some benefits on how we can make BrewVo more efficient in how we design the initial recipe. So minor tweaks to your normal typical recipe, but nothing significant. Just things that we can do that will actually probably be value engineering of the beer upfront. And then yeah, it’s going through a typical ferment cycle, but much faster. We don’t try and finish the beer before we put it through BrewVo because we’re doing a Multi-Brewed process. And then BrewVo receives that beer from your normal brewhouse from the fermenter. We put it through BrewVo and then we complete the beer using our patented approach to finishing that beer on a ferment cycle. So yeah, so it really is designed to be an installation inside an existing brewhouse and using traditional brewing processes, which would be well understood by your listeners.

Markus Raupach: Have you ever tried it with one of these very heavy beers like barrel-aged beers, or barley wines, or even icebox or something like that?

Gary Tickle: We’ve not been challenged to do that yet. But I don’t have a concern that we could do it. I think it’s more a question of at the moment we’re building style beers that are being requested by our customer base. So it’s really whatever product brief we they come with, we work on. I think the interesting thing to go back to your point earlier, Markus, is the exciting opportunity to bring beer back to markets which may be starved of that breadth of availability that, the styles that they just can’t get their hands on anymore. The idea that we can work with partner brewers in Germany, for example, who can receive Multi-Brewed beer, blend and pack, carbonate and pack it in a typical form that they would be used to doing, presents just a whole new way of working, right? Because it’s creating a whole new ecosystem for beer that doesn’t rely solely on kegs and cans to make it possible.

Markus Raupach: Yeah. And I think it would even be possible to make it with the Purity Law.

Gary Tickle: Yes, absolutely.

Markus Raupach: Because the only thing is that the carbonation has to be from carbon dioxide, which is from a brewing process. But that is possible because that’s available. And then you can do that. So that’s, I’m very curious about that and I’m very much looking forward to that.

Gary Tickle: I think it’s, is it Reinheitsgebot.

Markus Raupach: Yes, yes.

Gary Tickle: My pronunciation was probably?

Markus Raupach: No, it was good. That was very good.

Gary Tickle: It’s pretty good for an Australian, right?

Markus Raupach: Yeah.

Gary Tickle: So yeah, the short answer is yes, we totally respect those laws. We want that, right? Because our intention is to make high-quality fresh draft, high-quality beer that is not in any way created through artificial means. It’s through traditional brewing practices. So yes, we’d absolutely be able to do that and vice versa. It’d be very interesting to see some of the German beer styles more available coming this way. Because if you’ve got customers who have BrewVo on either side of the Atlantic, then effectively they can work together and they’ve got a closed ecosystem that they can help each other. And whoever has a BrewVo unit will have the ability to make this beer into the bag and box format, and thereby be available into these NexDraft tap systems. And I think of that as a very interesting opportunity of being able to put draft beer in places where you simply can’t put it today because of physical constraints. The fact that you can’t, you don’t have the space to put a large storeroom for kegs. So whether it’s things like cruise ships, for example, or small format, quick service restaurants, just places where draft experience would be great, but today, it’s physically not possible, we think that’s a new opportunity for NexDraft to bring beer to new places.

Markus Raupach: Yes, and you can expand the variety because you can have much more beers the same time if you have smaller containers. So yeah, fantastic. So if people now are interested, we will put the link to the website in the show notes. Is there any other hub of information where people could have a look at?

Gary Tickle: Yeah, well, I think our website www.BrewVo.com is the best place to look and we do have a Contact Us link on that page on that website. And feel free to reach out to us. We would love to talk to you and work with more brewers. We’re all about changing the world of beer. Our passion is to see beer grow and grow in a way that it has never been able to grow before. And also to be able to say that it is best in class in terms of sustainable footprint for the type of beverages we serve.

Markus Raupach: Yeah, what an important message and an important invention. So thanks a lot, and I’m really looking forward to coming back to the States and try some of these beers. And of course, you’re always invited to come to Germany and maybe also bring some. I would be very interested.

Gary Tickle: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we look forward to seeing you here. And of course, we look forward to working with partners in Germany as well.

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