How it started.
Lisa Marcus was managing a Portland restaurant and bar, doing what every beverage manager was doing in 2011: tracking kegs on a clipboard, guessing at levels, and rewriting the chalkboard whenever something blew. The menus were always a little out of date, and nobody could say with confidence what a keg had actually returned.
Eric Sterling was a software engineer. The two met on a dating app, which is a genuinely unlikely origin for a draft inventory platform, and started talking about the clipboard problem.
In August 2011 the first DigitalPour beer menu went live at Baileys Taproom in Portland. It was the very first digital draft menu to hit the market: a screen that knew what was actually on tap, connected to the system that knew what had actually been poured.
That October, the work landed on the cover of Beer Advocate. Craft beverage was exploding, and nobody was building software specifically for the people pouring it.
We have been at it ever since. The clipboard problem turned into draft inventory management, the one screen turned into big‑screen menus, web menus, print menus, and an app in your patrons' pockets, and the whole thing learned to talk to the POS systems locations already ran. Fifteen years of refinement, driven mostly by locations telling us what they actually needed.
