Drinks:

Can our taste buds tell if we’re drinking AI-generated whisky?

WE’VE SEEN artificial intelligence take over many tasks in the everyday world – from parking cars to stocking grocery-store aisles. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that AI has found its way into the creation of alcoholic beverages, which often involves a host of different ingredients, flavour notes, and precise recipes.

A Swedish distillery and a Philadelphia brewery are among the increasing number of manufacturers that have incorporated AI and other out-of-the-ordinary technology in their production. Why involve machines in these venerated crafts? Both companies saw it as an exciting learning experiment, but more importantly, they recognised technology’s ability to develop flavour profiles at lightning speed and standardise production.

Just outside Gävle, Sweden, Mackmyra Whisky partnered with Microsoft and Finnish tech company Fourkind to create the world’s first AI-generated whisky. The distillery used

machine-learning models on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and AI cognitive services and fed them Mackmyra’s existing recipes, cask types, sales data, customer reviews, and tasting notes.

The models could generate more than 70 million high-quality recipes. Master blender Angela D’Orazio reviewed hundreds of them until she landed on five to test in her laboratory. She then chose the best of the batch, a blend now known as Intelligens, which was released in September 2019.

‘What a programme like this can do is process a lot more [recipe] possibilities per second than a human brain can ever do,’ D’Orazio says. But human senses, especially taste and smell, remain irreplaceable. ‘Human context is needed,’ she says. ‘I was involved in every step – I decided on the recipe, I chose the casks.’ Although Mackmyra is the first to use a human-machine collaboration in the distilling process, D’Orazio expects this partnership to proliferate in the future. In fact, several breweries have already done so.

Dock Street Brewing Co in Philadelphia has used robots not to develop flavours but instead to help in the brewing process. The brewery partnered with its neighbour Exyn

Technologies – which specialises in drones for GPS-denied industrial environments, such as mines – to create Swarm Intelligence, a pale ale that was released in late January. Dock Street says the new brew is the world’s first drone-assisted beer.

‘Since [the drones] are autonomous, they can take on a variety of tasks, unlike a piece of brewing equipment that was designed to do one thing, one way, and if it breaks, it breaks,’ says Renata Certo-Ware, head of events and marketing for Dock Street. ‘Drones are more intuitive and able to be programmed and reprogrammed in a way that is much more amenable to trouble-shooting and being used for multiple tasks.’

Dock Street head brewer Mark Russell says the brewery and Exyn initially discussed using drones to deliver beer, but the autonomous aerial robots can only hold so much weight. They chose instead to use a drone to add hops into the brewing kettles.

‘On our scale, we’re very much still hands-on,’ Russell says. ‘This isn’t going to revolutionise our brewing. It was more just a fun thing for us to do. But creating a consistent product is always the goal for brewers, and anytime you can remove human error, that’s great.’

THE DISTILLERY USED MACHINELEARNING MODELS AND FED THEM EXISTING RECIPES, CASK TYPES, SALES DATA, CUSTOMER REVIEWS, AND TASTING NOTES.

/ BY SARAH KLOEPPLE /