Scientists Find That Artificial Intelligence Can Make Better Beer

AI is better at coming up with tastier beer recipes than even the most seasoned brewers according to a new study.

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AI is fast-changing the world and it might soon be changing the beer world as well according to Prof Kevin Verstrepen, the director of the VIB-KU Leuven Centre for Microbiology and the Leuven Institute for Beer Research in Belgium who helmed the study.

The idea was to start with “a well-known and popular commercial blond ale beer,” and using an AI model, that was fed info provided by a panel of 15 experts as well as the opinions of 180,000 public reviews on the RateBeer app, according to the Telegraph, as well as chemical analysis.

The original 6.5% ABV ale was scored and compared to the beer that had been tweaked using the data the AI model provided.

“After the modifications suggested by the model, the score jumped quite nicely and was among the best beers in the set,” Prof Verstrepen told The Telegraph.

“Moreover, it was a statistically significant change, which is not so trivial in aroma science because even with trained professional tasters, the ratings that humans give are always a bit noisy – tasting is not an exact science.”

“So, to get statistical significance, one really needs a big jump that is noticed by almost all tasters,” Verstrepen added.

15 experts evaluated the competing beers based on a set of 50 criteria, with Dr Miguel Roncoroni, who led the chemical analyses and tasting panel, calling the project “a Herculean effort”.

“We began the project with less than 100 beers, and quickly realized this would not be enough to capture Belgium’s incredible beer diversity, so we ended up analyzing 250 beers,” he added.

“We already received input from brewers during the study, and some are definitely eager to use this new knowledge as a tool,” Prof Verstrepen told The Telegraph. “Some brewers are more skeptical, fearing that this takes away from their craft or would result in only a few ‘standard’, bland beers.”

“I want to stress that this is absolutely not the case – people are all different and each of us has their preference, so there simply is no ‘one beer fits all’.

“But we can use new insights and tools to make existing beers even better, tweaking them.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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