Next Glass, the parent company of social media platform Untappd, has acquired FermentAble, a brewery management software company.
Ventura, California-based FermentAble was founded in 2015 by Darin Haener and Frank West. The platform is “designed to replace whiteboards and spreadsheets, providing simple-to-use software to manage inventory, scheduling, and all other aspects of the production side of running a brewery,” according to a press release.
The transaction closed Monday and was announced today. Financial details were not disclosed.
“Brewers have repeatedly asked us to deliver an affordable, reliable, and intuitive brewery management platform that they love to use,” Next Glass CEO Trace Smith said in the release. “We are throwing the full weight of Next Glass’s resources and existing technology solutions behind delivering small brewers the platform they deserve.”
FermentAble tracks inventory of raw materials, logs brewing information and scheduling, and generates necessary reports to submit to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).
A software engineer with a decade of craft beer industry experience, Haener is well-acquainted with both the product and its users.
“What I wanted to do was build something that brewers wanted to use, that was familiar to them, that used terminology that they understood,” he told Brewbound. “Really, I built something that I would have used.”
Haener’s brewing career kicked off in 1997 when he, then a 20-year-old prep cook, landed a job as a brewer at the now-closed Butterfield Brewing Company in his hometown of Fresno, California.
“I basically just bothered the brewer for about 18 months until he gave me the job,” Haener said, adding that he was also a homebrewer. “I don’t know if he just got tired of me giving him mediocre beer or wanted me to shut up.”
While overseeing several locations of brewpub chain BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse in Southern California, Haener became aware of the logistical struggles of managing beer production.
“I was still brewing part-time, but it got to a point where I was mostly just doing paperwork, and managing spreadsheets for multiple breweries and trying to decipher bad handwriting and things like that,” he said. “Around that time, I was like, why isn’t there software? Why does this software not exist?”
An avid coder since his pre-teen years, Haener left the beer industry in 2007 to pursue a career in tech to better support his family. He explored the brewery tech software landscape in 2014 and realized most options were designed for breweries much larger than the average craft brewer.
“These solutions were not priced for, like, 98% of the breweries out there, and did more than they needed,” Haener said.
FermentAble launched in 2015 and is designed for companies with small brewhouses that often lack large teams.
“You’re going to get a lot of value out of it if you’re the person who’s brewing the beer, and you’re also the person that’s doing the accounting, or filing the taxes,” Haener said. “You’re going to get a lot of value because it’s going to automate a lot of that stuff for you.”
Some of FermentAble’s 64 clients operate on brewhouses as small as two or three barrels, but the platform can support breweries that produce up to 20,000 barrels.
“At that point, they start needing more than we’re offering, at least currently,” Haener said. “That’s gonna change.”
In addition to access to its 4,000 brewery customers, Next Glass’ support means that Haener and West will be able to focus solely on the FermentAble product, rather than offering tech support, selling and marketing the platform, and handling accounting and bookkeeping.
“It’s gonna take a lot off of my plate,” Haener said.
The acquisition of FermentAble is one of several deals Next Glass has made in recent years. In April 2020, Boston-based equity firm Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) invested in Next Glass and charged the company to “look for other interesting players in our space, to make acquisitions,” Smith told Brewbound at the time.
Since then, Next Glass acquired digital magazine and event producer Hop Culture (December 2020), Oznr (October 2020), and beer review site and event producer Beer Advocate (February 2020). In July 2021, Next Glass acquired Vancouver, Canada-headquartered omnichannel beverage alcohol marketplace Ollie Order.