This beer has been brewed by an AI

Thomas McMullan Read more July 8, 2016

Say what you will about Google’s AlphaGo AI, it generally turned up to its championship matches sober. Actually, most AI tend to stay away from the bottle – which makes sense given their lack of mouth, or digestive system, or sense of fun.

One UK company is looking to change all that, though. IntelligentX’s AI might not actually drink beer, but it is learning how to brew it thanks to machine-learning algorithms.

It works like this: IntelligentX has made four different types of beer. People that drink the beer give their feedback to a bot on Facebook Messenger. The company’s algorithm – called Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI) – uses a mix of reinforcement learning and Bayesian optimisation to tell a human brewer how to push a beer’s recipe in one direction or another.

The result? IntelligentX is hoping this crowdsourcing-come-algorithm-based-optimisation will make prize-winning beer. To stop things ending up in a tepid middle ground of taste, ABI is being fitted with “wildcard” ingredients such as certain fruits, to, in the company’s words, push “the boundaries of what’s possible within craft brewing”.

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The venture is a partnership between creative agency 10x, and machine-learning firm Intelligent Layer, founded by Rob McInerney. “What Google’s DeepMind has achieved with AlphaGo is extremely impressive,” says McInerney. “However, what happens if you don’t have millions of data points to train a deep-learning algorithm? Clearly we can’t make a million beers, so we need to carefully manage uncertainty in the model so that what information we do have is used very efficiently.” intelligentx_co-founders_rob_mcinerney_left_and_hew_leith_right

Above: IntelligentX co-founders Rob McInerney (left) and Hew Leith (right)

Both McInerney and co-founder Hew Leith are keen to impress that IntelligentX is based on co-operation between human and AI, not a case of one’s judgement being usurped by the other. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t believe AI is going to take everyone’s jobs,” says Leith. “We believe the future is a place where AI augments humans’ skills. In this case we’re using AI to give our brewer superhuman skills, enabling them to test and receive feedback on our beer more quickly than ever before.”

IntelligentX insists its method allows brewers to respond to customers’ changing tastes faster than ever before, and the company’s four beers – Golder, Amber, Pale and Black – have apparently been altered around 11 times since they were first brewed.

There does, however, seem to be a fundamental incongruence between the fetishisation of traditional, local brewing at the heart of the current vogue for craft beer, and the impersonal use of an AI to crowdsource the most popular tastes. Then again, if the beer’s good, who cares?

You can try IntelligentX’s beer at UBREW in Bermondsey, London. You’ll also be able to order the AI-brewed beer on the firm’s website in the coming weeks.