The Daily Pour (formerly Bottle Raiders) is an AI-powered spirits review app that scans bottle labels and barcodes to surface aggregated ratings from expert and user reviews.

The problem

Two separate challenges shaped the build. Real bottles are messy: labels are often worn, missing, or oddly shaped, which made naive image matching unreliable on its own. The second challenge was structural. The product ran on two backends at once, a WordPress system and a Node.js/MongoDB system, and both had to agree on the same data quickly.

Architecture decisions

WordPress writes get pushed through a REST API to Node.js, which checks MongoDB and applies whatever updates are needed. One system stays the source of truth for a given change, so the two databases don’t end up racing each other.

For scanning, barcode recognition works alongside label-based AI matching. If a barcode alone isn’t enough to identify a bottle, the label picks up the slack.

Guest browsing needed to work without a signup wall, but writing a review or building a watchlist needed a real account. So anyone can browse and scan; only signed-in users can save.

Outcome

The app shipped on the App Store and Google Play. Forbes covered it, describing the ambition as building “the Vivino for premium spirits” — a specific, checkable line, not a generic compliment.