Brewers Association is pushing 2D bar codes or more commonly referred to as QR codes. They have been around since 1994. I have been experimenting with them for over a decade. Supply seems greatly outweighs the demand from the public or vendors in general for their use.
I first played with them at beer festivals, I would announce on social media a ‘secret menu’. If you scanned the QR code I’d have a growler of a special release hidden in our cooler for the public to sample, but I never poured a drop. Either the public didn’t know or simply didn’t care, far more interested in enjoying the festival than playing with their phone. At another brewery we went so far as to include them on the can label, but again the public wasn’t using them. I would bring up that at a weekly meeting we should discuss those numbers but they were never mentioned. The person who had proposed the idea was very into technology but the results weren’t worth mentioning.
That is not to say they can’t be useful in the brewing world. Often bags of malt will have a Certificate of Analysis (COA). QR codes are very for pulling a COA up to study and potentially save for record keeping for Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP). While not required for traditional brewing but as NA beer and other non-alcoholic beverages (THC seltzer) are becoming more common it’s a necessary practice. The other area I have found them of use was keg tracking. With the right software you can see a keg’s status, location, and maintenance history but in a more practical sense I found it an excellent backup to the kegging log. In the kegging log we would record the beer, batch, and how many and size(s) of kegs were used in a batch. It was a paper log that I’d enter into our production database regularly. Occasional I would note a batch would be finished, but the yield was low. I’d check our keg tracking software and discover kegs that hadn’t made it into the log.
Much like 3D televisions, those offering the technology are pushing more than the market is demanding it. But I suspect we will see great adaptation over time, just not from a consumer perspective.
