Business Update July 2020

We hope you are enjoying the start of a lovely summer (likely) in your own country. This month you will be able to get more insights about MiniBrew's future, the re-birth of the MiniBrew Beta Group and Minibrew Brew Packs. We have also included detailed information about shipment outside of Europe. 

MiniBrew Future

It has been a bumpy ride with many sharp bends to realise our mission to create a better world for the brewers of tomorrow. The right steps are taken to secure the future of MiniBrew and we’re getting close to an official deal with our creditors and investors. The last steps are being taken now. When the news is officially, it’s a huge milestone for anyone involved with Minibrew’s and especially our users.

We’re grateful that we’ve a truly amazing community of passionate Minibrewers that go above and beyond to help MiniBrew succeed in its mission and make the lives of people better and future brewing generations to come. As mentioned in the June Update, we’re seeing positive results in these challenging times. We’re seeing a large portion of our users buying less bottled or canned beer in the supermarket and visiting less bars. As a result our product and experience contributes to creating fresh craft beer locally.

(Left to right from: Splash Brewing, Official Shaunfrost, Kimmoniettin)

MiniBrew Team

In the last month, many familiar and long-term employees are no longer with us, which forced us to reorganise the business more efficiently, smarter and make things simple to create better products and services. It creates opportunities as we want to involve active users in our development, better understand your needs and develop features that improve the experience. 

To move forward, we’ve created a core and support team to secure the future. Here are the four faces that will be more on the forefront on Customer Service, Delivery and Sales to interact with you when you require support. Here is a snapshot of the core team (Left to right: Bart, Dennis, Guy and Rolf).

The support team will be responsible for the operation side at the back, for example securing ingredients for the brew pack, ensuring uptime off the platform and securing the next production orders.

MiniBrew BETA program

During 2020, we’ve assembled a team Minibrewers that were enthusiastic to take an active part in various aspects of the Minibrew device development such as new hardware, software tweaks and more. This BETA Group will help us make sure that everything that is delivered to the public gives you the best experience possible, while having great fun in experiencing new features first, and be in close contact with the Minibrew team.

Due to the recent changes in the company, having this group became much more valuable than before, giving them an opportunity to have more impact on the product, and us more security in releasing new features. Those facts also pushed us to transform the achievements we wanted to raise by cooperating with this group compared to what we previously thought to do. Some examples for their involvement include:

• A new mash tun design with thicker plastic envelope which makes it more resistant to cracking and breaking.
• A push-in connector between the machine and the water tap
• New customer “Onboarding Flow” in the Minibrew App
• New store page in the App in sync with our new Minibrew website 
• New faster brewing session logging mechanism on our servers
• Significant and minor bug fixes in the Firmware, major code refactoring projects, new unit testing environment in our build servers, major development framework updates

All of those and more need to be thoroughly tested and verified before being deployed for all our users. With the latest software and improved hardware you will be able to brew more, making cleaning more convenient for you. We will observe how this goes in the near future, and might be happy to add more members to the BETA Group.

MiniBrew Brew Packs

Our team is getting lots of suggestions which beers we can add to our portfolio. As we’ve re-organised our team, our first priority is to assure all current beer styles are available to you. We’re working on restocking the brew packs, such as “Get to the Hoppa” & Hazy Day. This brings the brew portfolio to over 15+ different brew packs.  Check our portfolio on MiniBrew.io

In the next phase, our goal is to share more recipes with the CRAFT pro users via the Brewery Portal. Instead of creating your own recipes, we will share a bunch of recipes from brewers around the world.

Shipment outside of the EU.

Some of you reached out to us asking about shipment and delivery schedules for the Minibrew CRAFT and MiniBrew CRAFT Pro models. In January we shipped many products to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel, Argentina, Malaysia, Paraguay, China, Macau and Chile. We were planning to ship to the remaining countries, but that came to a hold in our warehouse (see below).

At the moment we can’t ship products, like UPS can. Our current shipping company DPD has limited shipping capabilities and the cost of shipping is extremely high in COVID-19 times. We’re aware that UPS or FedEx are still shipping, but we’re not able to take the high cost that comes with shipping a 25kg package overseas at this time. If you can’t wait and you are willing to pay the extra price for shipping, we’re more than happy to send your Minibrew towards your address. Right now, we’re planning to ship machines to customers in the USA, Singapore and Panama when the rules are more relaxed. In case you are a new customer, you could check out The Man Cave in Singapore as they sell Minibrew's.

You can reach out to us at hello@minibrew.io if you have any questions about your Minibrew CRAFT, Minibrew CRAFT pro, the ordering process, or any other concerns. We hope you enjoyed this month’s update and look forward to hearing feedback in the comments below.