For craft beer bar owners, tap changes can be the bane of their existence. The amount of admin that goes into each change can take up to 20 minutes, once various systems across the business have been updated. Trickle is a tap management system that removes the admin from a rotating roster of beer taps and accounts for every beer poured.
Adrian Wills, co-owner of The Beer Spot in Auckland, created Trickle as a means to make this process more streamlined. The Beer Spot has up to 40 beers on tap at any one time, meaning that often up to six kegs needed to be changed every day. With a background in software development, Wills set to work finding a solution.
“There was a lot of admin every time it came to change a tap – a whole of annoying five-minute jobs – I started to toy around and experiment,” Wills explained. He experimented with flowmeters from all around the world, started writing code to measure all the pours, and then reconciled it with POS data. From a 20-minute process, Trickle allowed Wills and The Beer Spot to knock that process down to 30 seconds. It’s a simple concept – Trickle records all the raw and real pouring data, and tracks it against what has been sold, allowing bar owners to accurately keep track of profits and wastage.
“Everything you sell is waste of some sort,” said Wills. “It could be beer left in the bottom of the keg, or even theft, so the software is just about keeping a handle on all of that.”
Although he got involved with The Beer Spot two and a half years ago, it wasn’t until six months later that Wills realised he could turn Trickle into a business. It’s still a part-time venture, with Wills doing contract IT work as well, but it is taking off and is now being used in bars in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington.
The key to Trickle is its versatility. In an industry such as hospitality, notorious for high staff turnover, any system used in the venue must be easy to pick up, and Wills has designed Trickle to integrate with standard POS systems. Trickle takes care of much more than just recording beer flow – it automatically fetches beer metadata, generates product variants, prints labels and menus, reports on beer sales trends and can even notify beer enthusiasts of tap changes via social media.
So far, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Fundamentally it’s about bar owners being able to do more and save them time,” Wills said. “For a lot of them, we’re giving them their time back, and hopefully some of their money back as well.”
Despite Wills only working on the business part-time for now, the future is looking bright for Trickle. It was selected for the Vodafone xone Accelerator programme, and Wills is looking at taking the software trans-Tasman.
