As the world inches closer and closer to a fully automated and autonomous workforce, it’s no surprise that the craft beer industry would inevitably follow suit. Without getting technical or philosophical on the breadth and depth of current age AI and if it really counts as an artificial intelligence, one thing is certain; algorithmic solutions will eventually outpace human ingenuity.
Atwater Brewery of Detroit, Michigan has recently made headlines with their new “Artificial Intelligence IPA”. The 6.9% Centennial, Citra and Amarillo India pale ale is being touted as the first AI generated beer recipe used in Michigan.
Like my AI vs. NJ ABC post from Sunday, Joe Platt, QA Manager of Atwater, leveraged the now world famous ChatGPT (OpenAI’s large language model) to write the IPA recipe. Furthermore, the AI was also able to scale it to their 20 BBL system. Per Mr. Platt, the only tweak made to the recipe was a minor change to the grain bill.
As both a beer and technology enthusiast, I would be really interested in learning what drove the algorithm to select an IPA with Centennial, Citra and Amarillo. Did the bot leverage Untappd scores? Google trends? Publicly disclosed sales data from breweries and distributors? All the above?
When Melissa and I first started homebrewing ten years ago, we read a lot of books and spoke with a lot of brewers to understand the science behind beer. From water alkalinity to zymology, there is a lot of information for a novice to digest. AI such as ChatGPT will play an important role in homebrewing. AI tools will reduce the knowledge barrier of entry by providing summarized brewing and cleaning techniques in a simple, digestible format. ChatGPT would have been an extremely useful tool to leverage during our first homebrew.
So the $29 billion dollar question becomes – when will AI replace human brewing creativity? Will you trust an AI implicitly in your next home brew? Will your local brewery adopt AI for their production system? Let us know in the comments or on Instagram!
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Post featured image courtesy of www.vpnsrus.com
