They brew it up! Those maniacs! Anyone? Yeah, ok, fine.
After all the doom-and-gloom headlines about AI coming to take away our creativity and our faces and our jobs, there’s a grassy, hoppy, pleasantly carbonated bright spot in AI’s onslaught: breweries are using it to make batches of beer more uniform, helping guard against off-batches.
a sweet, refreshing change of pace
Beck’s got in on the act back in 2023 with “Beck’s Autonomous,” which it called “the world’s first beer and full marketing campaign made with artificial intelligence.” No surprise that they’re not a microbrewery but rather part of a monster company, but the idea had caught on at more flavorful breweries, which wisely left at least some of the human touch to the creation process.
Boston’s Night Shift Brewing beat them to market a few months earlier with their “AI-IPA,” an Hazy IPA (AKA New England IPA, or NEIPA). They fed the prompt into ChatGPT, which generated the recipe.
Detroit’s Atwater Brewery did the same thing, turning to ChatGPT for an experimental recipe-generation bout that same year. And Danish brand Mikkeller, which used ChatGPT to create two new beers that year.
But beyond a bit of show and drama for the novelty of having ChatGPT use its little derivative robo-mind to generate recipes, AI shows real promise for helping brewers eliminate the small variations in the brewing process that can ruin a batch of beer.
Brewers have gotten awfully good over the centuries at controlling the brewing process. However, it’s still an organic bit of chemistry with agents of nature (yeast, particularly) that don’t always play their roles how brewers want them to.
Large beer-brewing corporations, such as Sapporo, are using AI for market research as well, with fairly well-received results earlier this year. As long as it doesn’t replace the human creativity inherent in beer brewing, then I’m cautiously optimistic that this is one bit of AI news that’ll be easier to swallow than most.
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