Category: Company News
Since we last wrote, it’d an understatement to suggest that only a lot has happened. It’s been 3 years since we added a new story here, lol, so while our startup storytelling has been ultra light, our remarkable founders continue building on all fronts. As we curate the story of FliteBrite, Sinclair has also fired up a cool community initiative (Frontier Coworking). McDougal hosts a 100+ episode podcast, keeps making a ruckus within his wild museum, and now has a second book—Brewed From Within: Energy for the Entrepreneurial Lifestyle—on bookshelves nationwide. Davidson still builds ideas into reality through manufacturing and the co-founding team remains disciplined in always having fun.
FliteBrite is now a 12+ year old quest. Can you believe that?! After the pandemic put tasting rooms and beer festivals on ice, we’ve spent the past few years wrinkling back out around North America. Our beer festival app remains fresh and activate in cool places like Iowa, Maine, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Minnesota, Washington, and we’re back in California this weekend!
We’re going, going… back, back… to Cali, Cali 🎶
To peek under our hood, the California Brewers Festival is a cool example of how our partnerships can thrive. The FliteBrite brewfest app is back on tap this Saturday, so let’s use this hoppy client story to support this friendly company update. Ok, so we’ve enjoyed collaborating with the California Brewers Festival since 2023. Each year, they bring their Brewfest together and we curate a digital companion for their long-standing beer festival in Sacramento, California. Our simple system makes everything a breeze, so now we just have fun going with green lights, catching up as friends, activating the efficient tech stack, and making it easy to showcase the tasty art that everyone will be pouring at their annual brewfest. Their craft beer community, likes so many fantastic events, unites 50-75 breweries for a good causes and in this case, they have done so the past 30 years! Wanna see our brewfest app in action? Poke around http://FliteBrite.com/CalBrewfest to taste the #CalBrewfest app and as you can imagine, over time, the real-time attendee data reveals cool insights for endless storytelling.
We’ve crafted a cold tool for smart event organizers and brewers sharing their delicious creations within a community that cares. If you’re hosting beer festivals and want a cool twist to save time, we are open for growth and always enjoy meeting a new friend—let’s chat.
Along with a handful of events nationwide, our electronic serving system remains in the wings and will never stop refilling wonder. We build sophisticated with long-term IP strategies and healthy cash flow. We’re three friends with complimenting superpowers and a clean cap table. We get to build first in line, the front & center of craft beer, but also wine, cheese, and all that is fine dining. As we often joke, our customer discovery has sure been tasty. Cheers to all who have been a part of this long-term quest! Let’s keep playing to see what happens next.
We deliver good vibes.
Yes, our friendly team serves up the best beer festival app in the market, a data-driven way to understand the taste profiles of customers in taprooms, and a patented electronic serving system, but the crafted dedication our customers FEEL, is what makes FliteBrite remarkable.
Your team will be delighted in the time you save, new profit channels unlocked, and savvy support delivered to those you seek to serve. The peace of mind that comes with collaborating with our fun, creative, and experienced team makes a partnership with FliteBrite a key ingredient that ignites more freedom of expression for professionals thirsty for what’s next. Let’s chat.
Persistence brews ideas into reality 🍻
The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued US Patent 10,657,545 for FliteBrite’s innovative Electronic Serving System on May 19, 2020.
As we celebrate this milestone moment, our team would like to thank everyone who has supported this crazy journey that started by not knowing which beer was which as our beer flights arrived. We’d like to extend a special shoutout to Tim Zarley and the legal team at Zarley Law. This Iowa law firm dedicated to intellectual property law believed in our team and the potential of our electronic serving system since the very beginning. Together, we’ve successfully navigated the complex process of protecting both our trademarks and this patented technology that has increased the stability and overall value of our company.
#SmartFlights ignite an interactive food and beverage tasting experience unlike any other. US Patent 10,657,545 is an achievement that represents how unique this Electronic Serving System truly is.
Please contact us if your team is interested in our electronic beer flight paddles or licensing our patented technology. Cheers to US Patent 10,657,545!
This is the story of how we collaborated with the Iowa Brewers Guild to build our beer festival app. If you’re a brewfest organizer looking for a fresh way to save serious time while unlocking a more engaging beer festival experience, let’s chat!
The 2019 Festival of Iowa Beers featured 49 Iowa breweries who served up 197 different craft beers to 1,200 beer lovers. Here’s the FoIB app and let’s peek inside this 15th annual event with a look at the data generated from within our beer festival app!
The 100th brewery just opened in Iowa and this chill gathering continues to feel like the industry’s chance to celebrate together. Our team really enjoys #FoIB, which hosted at Millstream, the state’s very first brewery, and it was a treat to once again collaborate with the Iowa Brewers Guild to activate our beer festival app. It’s exciting to see how our slick platform continues to unlock new levels of attendee engagement, while saving serious time for event organizers and providing valuable data for everyone.
It was also neat to see our Best of Fest Award create more fun competition between brewers, who are all passionate about the beer they brew. Jack and Lucas from Flix Brewhouse came into this event with a clear goal of taking home the hoppy hardware and by actively encouraging attendees to rate the beers they sampled, this team was able to create all sorts of hype around their beers. After their DDH Nebulas IPA won Best of Fest, we all celebrated together and actually decided to visit their a brewery for a post-event tour in Des Moines! This award is just so much fun, so thanks to everyone who used our Vendor Portal to showcase their beers in the beer festival app, congrats to Flix Brewhouse (Instagram/Twitter) and we’ll see all you beer lovers again soon…cheers!
75 breweries, 361 remarkable brews and over 3,000 thirsty beer lovers came together for a hoppy good time at the 2019 Iowa Craft Brew Festival.
Our team once again collaborated with the Iowa Brewers Guild to activate our beer festival app. Since 2018, we’ve optimize the event organizer’s experience to save time, expanded how vendors manage their own beer lists and unlocked new ways attendees can plan, track and share their brew fest experience. This commitment has resulted in an affordable platform that does everything it needs to do, without unwanted fluff. As you can see from this ICBF summary, our event app fuels meaningful engagement and all sorts of interesting analytics for event organizers, vendors and the community overall.
One new element we brought to life was our “Best of Fest Award”. Our tap handle trophy was given to the brewery with the beer that received the highest/most ratings within the FliteBrite app during the event. This award was fun to make and had brewers excited as well.
We tracked all the data in real-time and enjoyed a random reveal (see video below) as everyone scattered after the event. It was neat to see how much our award winners (Franklin Street Brewing Company from Manchester, Iowa) appreciated the award and we had a great time celebrating with them afterwards. With so much interesting data at our finger tips, we’re excited to award more of these at future events!
After this remarkable event, we’re ready to collaborate with brew fests nationwide. If you’re planning a craft beer festival and want something fresh, affordable and fun, let’s chat!
Today marks the maiden voyage for how vendors can interact with our beer festival app. This new feature was unveiled as our new Vendor Portal sent invite emails to each of the 60 vendors that will be showcase at the upcoming BrrrFest 2019.
We’re so excited to be the official app fueling this craft beer event and we’ll be on-site to experience this indoor beer festival that celebrates the beers of winter and the brewers who make them!
Today’s mini milestone was the key first step that invites vendors to easily setup their profile and quickly create their beer list.
As we did some final preparation for deployment, Dave at SingleSpeed Brewing Company got to be the first guinea pig. With just a smart link and without any direction, here’s what he had to say about the profile setup and adding 7 beers to his real-time list of things being served at his booth for this upcoming beer festival.
“Are you guys kidding me? I handled that in what seemed like 3-4 minutes. Well done guys!”
We also tested a text message link with Scott from Firetrucker, so that was another passed test using the manual vendor invite feature we built in to aid event organizers. Scott liked the quick password and profile setup, and is excited to add his beers next time he’s at his computer.
We’re excited to hear from everyone else as invites land in a bunch of inboxes and to see how everything holds up as we unleash this sharp new way for organizers to save time, while vendors benefit from a slick tool set to make them look sweet. We’re giving the vendors Thurs-Sunday to setup their profile and beer lists before we announce the official BrrrFest Beer List next week!
Once vendors get setup, we’ll open the app to thirsty beer lovers excited to see their full beer list for the first time. That’s always fun watching as excited attendees get signed in with Untappd, build a little wish list to plan their visit and pick up last minute tickets as they get ready for an enlightened beer sampling experience inside another great craft beer event fueled by FliteBrite.
Thanks to the Bens at FliteBrite, the Iowa Brewers Guild, the BrrrFest organizing crew and all our brewery friends who will hopefully enjoy the beer list manager in our new Vendor Portal 🍻
Thirsty beer fans?!
Watch for a link to the BrrrFest App in next week’s announcement and we’ll see you for some beer festival fun super soon!
Introducing the FliteBrite vendor profile system built to save time by making real-time beer list management a breeze.
“Instead of a few doing a lot, allow many to do just a little.” -BEN
If you’re an event organizer, you know how challenging it can be to wrangle a bunch of different vendors to get you beer list organized. The official list of all that’s being served at your craft beer event is something that attendees want to see and a great promotional opportunity to drive ticket sales a few weeks from the event, but it can be like herding cats trying to manually organize your entire beer list.
After using our beer festival app at different types of events, we realized our platform could help organizers be way more efficient by allowing vendors to manage their own profiles and their ever-changing beer lists. We made the entire process super slick, easy and fast:
- Vendors receive email invitations to activate their free account.
- Each vendor sets up their own profile and creates a beer list.
- All done and anything can update from any device, anytime!
The FliteBrite Vendor Portal was built to save time and because it allows us to scale. We’re excited to hear what event organizers think of this new tool that gives vendors a chance to showcase themselves on the app, while saving them time and still offering a fresh new way for attendees to track all their favorites from the event.
If you’re an event organizer planning your calendar, we should chat!
After the successful deployment of our brew festival app, it was time to try something completely different.
Iowa Festival of Beers was in it’s 12th year and our beer fest app was a nice touch at this historic and chill event.
Imagine yourself in a magical field behind the oldest brewery in Iowa, having your choice of 200+ different beers from 40 Iowa breweries.
In short, 50 Iowa breweries, the Iowa Brewers Guild and around 1,200 beer lovers came together for a chill afternoon celebrating Iowa beers at Millstream Brewery.
There were 225 unique Iowa beers being served and as you can see in our post-event report, we had 587 app users track 433 beers. We awarded Contrary Brewing with most total ratings (28), while Orange Lazarus Milkshake from Alluvial Brewing Company and Larkness Monster from Lark Brewing tied for top rated beers. Along with all the seasonal Oktoberfest brews, it was interesting to see sour beers take over IPA in that new spot at most rated beer style.
This was the second big test for our beer festival app. Although we saw less overall engagement at the Festival of Iowa Beers, this was expected because of the rural location and cool, but very low tech vibe. It felt like nobody was on their phones, but after a great time sharing a few brews with so many brewery-owning friends, we returned home and were pleasantly surprised by the event’s analytical data that even at smaller craft beer events, we’re onto something here.
Cheers to Iowa beer, the amazing people that make it taste perfect, bratwursts and watching thirsty craft beer fans track their favorite tastes from throughout the day.
We’re proud to announce our partnership with the Iowa Brewers Guild! Together, we’ve unleashed a new extension to our smart flight platform brewed specifically for craft beer events!
Here’s how it all went down. As our beer flight app was being piloted at local restaurants, breweries and bars, our team collaborated with the Iowa Brewers Guild to use our evolving smart flight platform to connect beer-loving attendees with their tasting experience at live events nationwide. Feature ideas have now evolved into reality and we’re thrilled to announce the unveiling of our brand new brewfest app at The 2018 Iowa Craft Brew Festival!
“It’s been such a pleasure collaborating with so many industry allies throughout Iowa and this partnership with the Iowa Brewers Guild is special. Together, we’ve build a fun way for thirsty attendees to enjoy, track, rate and share their favorite beers at this year’s Iowa Craft Brew Festival!” -Ben McDougal
Here are key features attendees will enjoy:
- FULL VENDOR LIST – Attendees can track the booths they’ve visited and navigate to where they want to head next. With 75+ vendors and 350+ craft beers to try, we’ve also included live stats on the percentage of vendors visited and total beers tasted as you make your way through the event.
- BEER DETAILS – Each beer from every vendor is featured with a short description, IBU and ABV. Along with fun details, attendees can check-in on Untappd, add tasting notes, include a personal rating and share their #ICBF experience throughout social media.
- TASTING REPORT – After a long day of tasting so many great beers, we know people will love looking back at all the beers they tried.
Special thanks to J. Wilson, Kelsey Seay and the Bens on our own team. Together, we’ve built something event organizers, vendors and attendees will all appreciate! We look forward to seeing everyone at the Iowa Craft Brew Festival and we hope everyone has fun drinking, tracking, rating and sharing your favorite craft beers. Cheers 🍻
