Adding the Empire State Beer Trail to the New York Craft Beer App

One of Daruma Tech’s earliest digital passport apps, the New York Craft Beer App, built for the New York State Brewers Association (NYSBA), quickly gained popularity—and caught the eye of New York’s then-governor, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo was actively promoting the 750-mile Empire Beer Trail, a new passport program jointly developed by NYSBA, the Empire State Trail, and the Canal Corporation—and he proposed incorporating this trail into the existing New York Craft Beer app, even offering state funding to help make this happen.

Client Overview

The New York State Brewers Association was founded in 2003 to serve as a marketing and legislative advocate for the state’s 400-plus breweries and affiliated businesses. It seeks to unify the state’s brewers and build public awareness and appreciation of the state’s craft beer offerings.

Client: New York State Brewers Association
Location: Rochester, New York
Industry: Manufacturing, hospitality
Daruma Tech Services: App redesign, development, and maintenance

Challenge

The original New York Craft Beer App included a passport program and informational pages on participating NYSBA member breweries. It also allowed users to map out their own tours of selected breweries and share their brewery experiences on social media. Users could also earn points toward prizes by visiting participating breweries. Adding the Empire State Beer Trail and its separate passport program to the app would require significant reconfiguration of the app’s original design.

Discovery

Strategically, incorporating the Empire State Beer Trail into the New York Craft Beer App made perfect sense—it would put the new trail and its passport program in front of an audience already enthusiastic about New York’s craft brews and actively interested in exploring the state’s brewery scene. And having built a long and productive working relationship with NYSBA, Daruma Tech was confident it could meet their expectations.

Solution & Implementation

To create the carrier app, Daruma Tech employed cost-effective open-source mobile content-management systems and leveraged its previous experience creating mobile apps for other prominent museums.

Daruma Tech used the information provided by MODS to create a container app, make sure that all the AR assets worked properly and to place the app in the Apple Store and the Google Play store accordingly. We also created the AR targets for the students for a secondary project – augmented reality scavenger hunts.

Results

Daruma Tech rebuilt the New York Craft Beer App to accommodate the two separate trails and their passport and incentive programs. The upgraded app also allows users to participate in both passport programs at once if they wish. This means app users now have access to over 460 participating breweries—including their locations, offerings on tap, and more—right on their phones.