When Beck’s a storied German brewery founded in the city of Bremen in 1873, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2023 it decided to bring in a new brewmaster to mark the occasion: ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot.
The company asked it to whip up a recipe using only hops, yeast, water, and malt. The result was “Beck’s Autonomous”, a lager with a subtle sweetness, a hoppy texture, and quite a head. One Daily Mail reporter considered it better than the brewery’s standard lager.
Beer and AI may seem an unlikely pairing, but Beck’s is far from the only brand to have asked for input from the technology.
Atwater Brewery, an American firm, introduced an AI-designed citrusy India pale ale (IPA) in 2023 and last year St Austell Brewery in Britain used AI to create a tropical IPA dubbed “Hand Brewed by Robots”.
In March Coedo Brewery in Japan asked an AI model to analyse the preferences of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and then developed four craft beers, one for each age range. In general the response from customers, brewers say, has been overwhelmingly positive.
“It gives us access to new recipes that we didn’t think about before,” says Prinz Pinakatt, boss of the beer business for Tilray Brands, Atwater’s New York-based parent company.
Machine-learning tools can parse the minutiae of complex flavours, analyse the ingredients and equipment that an individual brewery has available, and then concoct new recipes while tweaking sweetness, acidity, hop level and other attributes to ensure the end product appeals to discerning customers.
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