Fermanagh man Chris McClelland is one of the brains behind an innovative beer-making robot that allows users to brew consistently high quality beer with an iPhone.

Brewbot is the name of the company, founded in 2013 by McClelland – son of Morris and Linda McClelland, from Maguiresbridge – and five friends.

The group decided to combine their interest in home brewing with the knowledge and expertise gained from their day jobs as mobile software developers to create an easy-to-use, controlled brewing process using the latest sensor technology. The result was Brewbot: a compact micro-brewery that they have successfully been selling to bars, restaurants, companies and breweries in the UK and USA.

In recent weeks, Brewbots have been shipped to the Battery Club and the Twitter building in San Francisco, where Chris now lives.
The former Portora student is Chief Executive of the business which initially set out to raise £100,000 on crowd-funding website Kickstarter. Their crowd-funding campaign was successful, with 381 investors coming on board and offering more than their target. The Belfast-based team then embarked on a worldwide quest to scale the production of the device. This brought them to Austin, Texas, where they joined the Techstars Accelerator programme, which is viewed as one of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems in the world. 

To date, Brewbot has secured over $2.5 million (£1.9 million) from well-known Silicon Valley CEOs and investors including: Michael and Xochi Birch (Bebo) and more recently Marc Benioff (Salesforce) and some of the people behind Paypal e.g. Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp) and Kevin Hartz (Eventbrite). They also received early funding from Invest NI and Techstart NI.

It is targeting restaurateurs, enthusiast brewers and consumers.

Speaking to The Impartial Reporter from San Fransisco, where he lives with his fiancée Rosie and children Milo and Apolline, Chris explained: “We set up base in San Francisco in order to focus growth in the US as well as to further attract US investment into the company. For example we will be in at least 20 Brewbot bars in San Francisco by end of year.”

Outlining the company’s ambitions, he said: “We want to create a distributed brewery that can compete with any global brewery.
“We want to see a regional role out of machines state-by-state.
“We are opening up the technology inside Brewbot to other breweries to enable brewers to reduce risk and maximise quality by providing better insights and data on their brews.”

He observed: “Beer is seeing a major shift towards onsite brewing, and craft beer is still emerging. As a technology we will graduate with brewers on our network and become a part of the growth of craft beer.”
Now, as well as making their stainless steel beer brewing device and the app that tells you exactly what ingredients to put in it, Brewbot supplies bottles and labels for packaging. It has sold over 150 units so far and has huge ambitions for further growth. 

Describing the invention, Chris said: “Brewbot is a robot that brews beer. Despite being the third-most popular drink in the world, there is no widely available commercial solution that empowers anyone to brew beer. Brewing beer is an age old process that is daunting, laborious, inefficient, difficult to repeat, ugly, messy and often dangerous.

“Brewbot creates the ultimate environment to brew beer. It is a beautiful wooden and stainless steel appliance, combining furniture making with smart technology. By connecting it to an app a user can choose, tweak or design a recipe, and watch as Brewbot turns water into beer!”

When Invest NI announced an £82,000 investment in Brewbot in 2014, Brewbot’s Creative Lead Jonny Campbell revealed that they had already secured over £250,000 worth of business from customers in export markets. He said: “Our technology takes all the hassle from craft brewing such as water measurements, timing and temperatures and enables brewers to control the process effectively using the mobile internet. Our package includes advice on recipes and ingredients and guidance on the brewing process from start to finish.” He said the funding “helped us to convert a smart idea into a smart technology product that is now attracting huge international interest.”

In June last year, Brewbot opened a bar on Belfast’s Ormeau Road. The bar, which also functions as the company’s Belfast Headquarters, allows customers to enjoy a beer brewed on current and future versions of Brewbot in a bar setting, as well as over 200 craft beers. 

The bar has also hosted events such as a collaborative brewer’s networking event, the 2016 launch of a new Galway Bay Brewery’s beer, and ‘tap takeovers’ by other brewing companies.
Brewbot is based in Belfast and San Fransisco and, in three years, has grown its staff from five to 30.