As bars and breweries stock up for New Year‘s Eve, some will use an app from a Carmel company to make sure they‘re not tapped out.
Because you can‘t see into a beer keg, SteadyServ CEO Steve Hershberger says bars can’t tell when they‘re running low, and brewers don’t know which beers are selling fastest. He says most bars just guess.
Hershberger founded SteadyServ to seek a high-tech solution to that problem. The result: the iKeg, a sensor which weighs how much beer is left, using a built-in wireless connection to SteadyServ‘s database and also gathers information from local weather to economic indicators to forecast how long that supply is likely to hold out.
The Internet connection also allows bars to advise customers via social media what‘s on tap.
Hershberger says SteadyServ maintains a database of more than 40-thousand beers and the vessels they‘re shipped in, allowing the sensor to distinguish the weights of different brews. SteadyServ‘s customer base includes not just taverns but the brewers.
Hershberger says industry watchers can‘t make adequate judgments of which beers are selling well unless they know not just how much was shipped to the distributor, but how much customers are ordering.