Next Glass makes it easy to shop for beer and wine

Have you ever walked into a beer or wine store only to be overwhelmed by the vast selection, including many options you’d never even heard of? We’ve all been there, but there’s a new app that should help recommend options you’ve yet to taste. Next Glass uses your phone’s camera to scan a bottle before offering you a score as to whether or not you’d like it. Based on ratings submitted the first time the app gets fired up, and scores continually added along the way, the software uses its so-called Genome Cellar to sift through a beer or wine’s chemistry and predict your taste preferences.

A bad wine recommendation led to the creation of Next Glass, a new app that predicts whether that next wine or beer you buy will taste good to you. The free app, out Thursday for Android and iOS, learns your taste profile as you rate wines and beers. Then when you shop, you can use the app to scan new bottles that you might want to buy. Next Glass displays ratings for you and friends who use the app. You also get a calorie count. After you download the app, you rate some wines or beers that you like and dislike. The app will use that to compare to its “Genomic Cellar,” a growing database of more than 23,000 bottles of wine and beer. Each one is analyzed at the molecular level to create a taste DNA. When you use the app to scan a wine or beer label, the app predicts your compatibility within 96% accuracy, Next Glass’ founders say. “The more you rate, the more we learn about you,” said Next Glass CEO Kurt Taylor. “We look through chemistry of the beers and wines you have given us your preference on and we are able to find correlations and trends within your profile to figure out what is driving your enjoyment of those bottles. Then, we can look through our database and score out each of those to let you know if you are going to like them or not.”