Next Glass is ready to be filled.
 
The Wilmington-based startup announced Thursday that it has launched its app that allows users to create personal profiles of wines and beers they like, taking much of the guesswork out of choosing a beverage from unfamiliar options at restaurants and stores.
 
Next Glass is free of charge and available to download now on both iOS and Android devices, the company’s news release stated.
 
Touting their product, company officials say it “cracks the code of taste,” drawing from an extensive data bank – what they call their “genome cellar” – that contains chemical profiles of 500,000 wines and beers. Founder and CEO Kurt Taylor and his team have spent months testing samples of these beverages to map the so-called DNA of each brew and each vintage.

Once users download the app, they are prompted to rate a few wines and beers that they have already tasted. Next Glass then compares their chemical taste preferences to the entire “genome cellar” to predict the next glass of wine or beer that each person will enjoy. Users just scan or enter the name of a wine or beer through the app and then receive a personal rating without ever having to take a single sip.
 
App users are encouraged to keep adding ratings to fill out their own taste profile.  The more preferences a user logs on his app profile, the more accurate – and diverse – Next Glass’s recommendations will be for him, Taylor said.
 
“Defining taste is nearly impossible since it’s a deeply personal experience, especially when it comes to wine and beer. What is fruity and sweet to me may be dry and tart to someone else,” he said in a   news release. “People are generally overwhelmed by all of the different wines and beers to choose from. We’re here to make the process as easy as possible by removing the ambiguous opinions. With Next Glass, you don’t have to worry about what you pick because you know you’re going to love it.”
 
The official launch comes two weeks after Next Glass released its beta version to get feedback from testers.
 
“We wanted to get the app into a couple thousand people’s hands to see how the back end worked and to get feedback from users so we’d have time to make adjustments before the full national launch,” Taylor said in an interview Wednesday. “We were expecting feedback from 2,000 users but got it from 20,000. We just watched the numbers pop. We were up until four in the morning for four days straight, responding to all the feedback. It’s important to treat [the users] well so they will become fans.”
 
The first weekend during the beta period, Next Glass logged about 50,000 scans. Taylor, walking into a grocery store in Charlotte, saw a customer uploading a bottle label onto his app.
 
“That was really cool,” he said.
 
Overall, Taylor said he and his team are satisfied with how their app design and function have held up during the beta period. They also gleaned some good ideas to build into updates.
 
While ultimately Next Glass’s revenue will come from restaurants and stores that want a presence on the app, the company’s focus for the next year or so will be optimizing the user’s experience and expanding the user base, Taylor said. He hopes that by 2016, the company will begin enlisting commercial establishments, which can list their offerings on the app as well as connecting with individual users to offer wines and beers they are likely to enjoy.
 
Meanwhile, Next Glass is looking to bringing its operations under one roof when it relocates to a facility in downtown Wilmington sometime in late spring 2015, Taylor said. The historic building at 21 S. Front St. is currently being rehabbed.
 
And then, there’s that never-ending challenge of testing new wines and beers as they hit the market.