Savvy New Beer Mag Embraces Cutting-Edge App

Last night I attended the launch party of a new magazine created by an old hand in the world of beer media – Megan Flynn. The woman behind Beer Northwest has expanded to include the entire West Coast with Beer West Magazine.

The new magazine might have been the reason we were all at this launch party, but a new app was center stage: Beer West is the first magazine to partner with Beaverton-based tech company Digimarc to provide reader-only content through a phone app. What sets this app apart is it registers what the phone is looking at. Behind 25 different images in Beer West Magazine is a special watermark (which can be printed behind anything, even, theoretically, a temporary tattoo). The app recognizes the watermark and connects to special content online.

While Megan was talking about Beer West and Digimarc in front of the audience of writers and PR reps, a news clip on KGW flashed onto the pub’s televisions featuring non other than Megan, herself, and a montage of people with iPhones flashing their screens at pages of Beer West. Kudos to Megan for having the guts to launch a magazine in these stilted economic times, and for having the business savvy to create so much buzz around it. Partnering with Digimarc was an intelligent move (and they revealed how much this cost the magazine: $4.99 a watermark, that’s a total of only about $125).

A feature article on Deschutes Brewery’s newest brewer Veronica Vega is included in this first edition of Beer West – and you got it – readers can use the app to access a reader-only interview with her online. (FYI - the print article is much longer than the blip online, with a two and a half-page spread on Vega. Should she consider creating her own fan club? With a name like Veronica Vega, of course she should!)

In the future, the app is also suppose to register what the phone is listening too, a feature that will put users, as CEO Bruce Davis put it, “in the web, not on the web.” To her credit, Megan made a little joke about how spooky that sounded.

If this new app becomes as big as Davis hopes, it could be a step towards keeping print relevant by making it more interactive with the web and more fun. Personally, I would never trade in my books, magazines and newspapers for Kindles and Ipads. But I’m old school—sometimes I like to unplug and look up from my computer screen. Interestingly, getting away from the computer is one of the motivations Davis cited, saying the app “could liberate the world.”

I couldn’t help being distracted by the six o’clock news flashing on the giant TVs looming above Megan and Davis. The screen showed interviews with Hilary Clinton, President Obama and scenes of protesters running through the streets of Egypt. “Well,” I thought to myself. “It’s not liberating the entire world.”