UNC Alum Helps Launch AI Tool for Brewers

The art of brewing the best craft beer is a science - one that a Durham-based company is hoping to make easier through technology.

Jared Resnick, former owner of West End Wine Bar in Chapel Hill, founded Sennos, which has been working since 2017 to create a device that would act as an intelligent sensor to help take some of the guesswork out of the fermentation process.

The Sennos M3 is an in-tank fermentation sensor system that will continually monitor things like gravity, dissolved oxygen, pH, pressure and temperature. That information is then sent immediately to the Sennosystem platform on mobile or desktop.

Resnick said the system helps brewers cut waste, boost consistency and maximize efficiency.

With so much data being collected, Resnick says the system is able to use AI to forecast fermentation completion, detect anomalies and recommend interventions before they impact quality.

The system is designed to help brewers maintain consistency, something Resnick said he learned a lot about when West End Wine Bar started pouring craft beer.

"We were one of the first places to pour true craft beer," Resnick remembers. "As the craft market starts to blow up and get bigger and bigger, one of the things we noticed was consistency issues. Some of them, we'd have to buy three cylinders to ensure that two of them were good. The beer was great when it was great, but when it was bad, it was bad."

The University of North Carolina alumnus soon launched Precision Fermentation, which evolved into Sennos.

"I was able to start Precision Fermentation with the idea - that it was kind of a crazy idea...that we needed to build something that would retrofit onto fermentation tanks," he said.

"I knew the fermentation tanks from beer and wine and all the beverages, but I also knew they were an alternative fuels, biofuels," he added. "What I learned was everybody had an antiquated technology. Things were not connected, not just like data streams, but up and down the food chain."

Resnick started with the idea that they would start pulling liquid out of the tank and sending it to the cloud. "It was a lot harder than that," he said.

Resnick said he knew the product has an infinite number of possibilities.

"So I brought together an original team that really could think outside of the box. And that's what we built. We built a box," he said.

The team built a $25,000 box with parts from Home Depot and Lowes.

"We get it into the first brewery and it starts to run and we see data and we're like, this is incredible," he said, noting that within five minutes the fluid pass started spraying and destroyed the box.

Multiple iterations were created of the box and the sensors.

Precision Fermentation officially launched its produce in March 2020 - just before the pandemic.

"In some ways, it was a gift. It enabled us to sit back a little bit and think more about what we were doing and engage with the customers and actually keep some breweries alive that couldn't get into their breweries. One person would come in and you have to remember, you know, what we're doing is we're enabling people to see everything that's going inside of their black box of the tank from afar, because we have a user interface," Resnick said.

When the pandemic subsided and businesses began to reopen, Resnick and his wife opted not to reopen the wine bar - instead focusing on their tech company.

By 2023, they were in 13 countries and more than 700 systems in breweries. In the past two years, the company has grown to include local brewers like those at Atomic Clock Brewing Company and The Glass Jug.

Sennos also moved its headquarters this year to the Venable Center Campus in downtown Durham.

"While we're focused on brewing right now...we're also starting to work in wine. We're also doing excellent work in cider," Resnick said. "We start working in coffee. Eventually one day, we'll get inside of pharmaceuticals."

Originally published by WRAL, by Kathy Hanrahan, WRAL lifestyle editor