Backwash Craft Brewery Event Uses NFC Tags for Real-Time Beer Voting Competition

In October 2012 GoToTags and Access Pass & Design teamed up to bring even more excitement to the annual Backwash Reno Craft Brewing Competition. Every year, a roomful of craft brewers (generally fathers and sons) get together to show off their best beers and compete for two prizes: Most Popular and Brewer’s Choice. The proceeds from the event’s entry fee benefit Project Go, a foundation that helps kids develop a healthier outlook on life by introducing them to challenges and opportunities.

We wanted to help elevate the event by introducing some NFC action into the voting process. Previously, voting was done with traditional handwritten votes on slips of paper-a daunting and often unreliable task. In order to innovate the voting system, we designed NFC enabled badges which were given to each of the attendees. Once attendees decided on their favorite beer, they found one of event’s beer girls who were each equipped with NFC enabled Android phones. The Android phones would read the attendee’s NFC badge thus activating a screen on the phone and allowing attendees to use the UI to vote electronically. The cast vote was then sent in real time to a central server for collection. In order to add a little more enthusiasm into the voting process, the introduction of NFC badges and UI voting allowed for votes to be displayed in real-time on a wall in the room. The Backwash Reno Craft Brewing Competition is a prime example of how the real-time data collection possibilities of NFC can easily enhance an event while dramatically raising participation and thus the energy level!