Design Challenge and Design Ideas

Guinness Foreign Extra Stout (FES) is a carbonated beer that is the most consumed Guinness beer type in Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. In these markets, bottled beer is the format of choice, but 8 out of 10 drinkers don’t believe it delivers a premium experience.
With bars at the beating heart of African culture and conspicuous brand consumption being a desired experience to convey social distinction and brand congruity, a table-shared bottle of spirits is considered more desirable than premium branded beer. Although 100% of consumers believe fresh beer on tap elevates the experience, it requires kegs, beer lines and infrastructure that remains an operational challenge in Africa, and is served quietly away from the table.
With this performance gap in mind, the Guinness FutureServe team took the search for a premium in-bar beer experience to Africa to discover possibilities from local market representatives, bar owners and consumers.

How the brief was fulfilled

The Guinness ProServe experience is a concept born in Africa with an engaging in-bar consumer journey as its core. African regional commercial representatives fuelled the creative ideation of promising concepts leading to the concept of an at-table, wireless draught dispense system featuring the smallest keg in the world!
Guinness ProServe builds on the existing Guinness MicroDraught dispense platform by bringing tuned-ultrasonic draught dispense to carbonated beer for the first time through an array of new modular elements including battery for wireless dispense, a collapsible telescopic structure that caters to different can formats and carry-handle. The unit’s inner arms are decorated with bright and colourful Guinness Africa brand visuals and an LED display guides the consumer through their pour.
Pulling the tap handle, the unit pierces both ends of a chilled, blank-ended can. A patented valve-arrangement allows the beer to pour effortlessly under gravity into a branded glass, its angle constantly adjusted by the damped cradle to allow the deep-black beer to pour with minimal head formation. In the last seconds of pour, the unit transfers an ultrasonic impulse into the pouring liquid, instantly creating a generously-deep and tight creamy head that domes above the glass. Dissolved carbon dioxide is abundantly more sensitive to breakout than dissolved nitrogen for which MicroDraught was designed, so a substantially finer level of energy control and calibration was developed to consistently realise a head of the desired height.

The consumer is left to savour the spectacle and drink the rich, full-bodied stout through the creamy head for a smooth taste like never before.
Guinness ProServe brings premium draught dispense to FES using existing tooled elements of a core MicroDraught dispense platform plus a modular subset of new elements for the FES proposition. Distilled to the essence of draught-serve, ProServe provides an affordable, low-energy, and low-material consumption dispense unit compared to the chilled cellar, bottled gas and beer lines of a traditional draught dispense.
Guinness ProServe is a radically-enhanced and immersive in-bar beer experience that, regardless of infrastructure, brings the magical spectacle and taste of draught Guinness FES to tables across Africa for the very first time.