Next Glass Knows If You'll Love a Beer or Wine By Scanning the Label

Nov 21, 2014

(LifeHacker) - iOS/Android: Using the description of a bottle of beer or wine to see if you'll like it can be hit or miss. Next Glass is a new app that uses a huge database of drinks, your tastes, and your smartphone's camera to tell you—just by scanning the label—if you'll love or hate a drink before you buy it.

We've been testing Next Glass out for a while now (since it's been in closed beta for a few weeks), and so far it works well (when it works. More on that later.) After you've installed the app and set up an account, Next Glass walks you through setting up a "taste profile," so it can get an idea of the types of drinks you enjoy. Enter some beers or wines that you like, and the app will have a good idea of the characteristics you like. This step is pretty important, so flesh out your taste profile as much as possible.

From there, the next time you're buying beer or wine, just take out your phone, fire up Next Glass, and scan the label. If you get a match, the app will hover over a popup view of the bottle along with a score that indicates how much you'll probably enjoy it, based on your taste profile. The deeper and more accurate your taste profile is, the better the app's predictions will be. The scanning is the big feature here, but if the label is difficult to read or the app just can't get a handle on the words on the label, you can always switch to keyword search to type in the name of the drink manually.

In our tests, Next Glass worked really well when it could recognize the beers and wines I scanned. When I was at the grocery store, the app worked best with well-known (and some smaller) brands of beer and wine. The app failed on several bottles I had at home, and sometimes when it found the right winery, it didn't have the right varietal. Even so, that may be because it's geared to the broadest set of palates at launch. You'll almost certainly have better luck at big box stores and larger liquor stores than you will trying to judge local or artisan wines or brews—although as more people use the app, the more drinks get submitted, and everyone benefits. This also underscores why it's important to set your taste profile as carefully as possible, so when it does find something, it has good information to draw on. As you buy and drink, you can go back and rate the things you've purchased, which further a


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