We're two brothers united by a love for craft beer and a shared obsession with delivering quality products and experiences. One of us spent years designing best-in-class electronics; the other has spent his career keeping beverage systems clean and pouring right. Barkeep Sensors is what happens when those worlds meet: a full-stack solution that assures every customer experiences your beer exactly the way you intended.
Zack owns Mule Labs and leads Barkeep’s hardware, firmware, software, and IoT infrastructure design. A former Tesla electronic design engineer who worked on the Optimus robot, he holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and brings 10 years of experience designing best-in-class industrial and consumer electronics for startups and Fortune 100 companies. He channels that background into sensor hardware that is rugged, reliable, and built to live in a working bar.
Nick owns Cleveland Beer Line Cleaning LLC and brings 13 years in beverage dispensing and sanitation to Barkeep, on top of 25 years in the hydraulics and pneumatics industry. With a BS in Biochemistry focused on microbiology, he understands exactly how temperature, pressure, and line hygiene make or break a pour, and he grounds the product in the real-world realities of keeping draught systems clean and in spec.
Barkeep started with a simple ask: Nick wanted a way to track pressure and temperature from his phone for his clients, so he and his technicians could service their systems better.
We built a prototype device that could sense pressure and push its readings up to the internet. The goal was simple, get real data flowing so we could start learning what actually matters.
We partnered with three local establishments to put the sensors into real bars and get honest feedback from the people using them, working out firmware kinks along the way. That deployment has now run for over a year with 99.999% uptime.
With a year of field data in hand, we started work on production-intent designs. We pivoted to LoRa for its ability to penetrate walls and coolers, then engineered gateways and sensors targeting 10-year battery life and over 500m of range while reporting a sample every 10 minutes.
We built out the front end and back end for a full-stack IoT platform, spanning web, Android, and iOS apps. Every screen is tuned to be genuinely useful whether you run a single taproom or a large operation, and whether you are the owner, an employee, or a beverage technician.
We took on the full electronic and mechanical design for production-intent custom PCBAs and enclosures, engineering hardware that is manufacturable at scale and rugged enough to live in a working bar for years.
We put engineering samples of the production-intent design through real-world testing and validation, confirming that range, battery life, and accuracy hold up under the same conditions our customers face every day.
We are currently wrapping up all the non-engineering details that go into bringing a product to market: packaging, the landing page, checkout, legal, and everything in between, getting Barkeep Sensors ready to ship and support at scale.
