People have been brewing beer for thousands of years. Historians in 1992 found evidence of its production in ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq; one 3,900 year-old Sumerian poem written to honour Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, contains the oldest surviving recipe for beer. Further back still, in China, residue on pottery from 5,000 years ago shows the use of barley and other grains to make the drink.
Here in Britain, brewing has been omnipresent for centuries too. Today it remains a cultural touchstone, a societal fixture talked about and debated (Madri sucks; Asahi is worth the extra quid). And until recently, beer has always been made by people who graft hard. Their expertise has been paramount to the process — a good lager, ale, porter or stout has always required keen and practised human intervention. Take Guinness, which is still based on a recipe created by the family in 1821 (it existed long before, but changed over time).
But beer, like so many facets of our existence, is not immune to artificial intelligence. In recent years, AI has started to have an impact on brewing as those in charge seek efficiency and help in producing better beer more easily.
The owners of Beck’s, the German brewery founded in Bremen in 1873, celebrated its 150th birthday by employing a new brewmaster, ChatGPT, to write a recipe using hops, yeast, water and malt. The result was a lager called Beck’s Autonomous, which is said to have a hoppy texture, a subtle sweetness and a generous head. No bad thing, then. Some considered it to be superior to the brewery’s existing offerings.
Closer to home and the Cornwall-based brewery St Austell is also employing the services of bots. Its tropical IPA is described as “hand brewed by robots”, with head brewer Barnaby Skerrett feeding an online generator instructions to formulate a recipe. No time was saved and the beer was still made by hand, but it speaks volumes that even smaller, rural breweries are experimenting with AI.
“The idea for the beer came from me working with AI tools in my general job with brewhouse automation,” Skerrett says. “As I was talking to the AI one day I thought I’d ask it a question about brewing to catch it out as I was interested to see the results.“I told it to write me a recipe on some broad parameters of colours and flavours and it sent me some ideas, so I decided to turn them into a recipe.”
Across the world, other breweries are doing similar. Atwater Brewery, near Detroit in the US, designed a citrusy IPA in 2023 using AI. In March, the Japanese beer maker Coedo used a generative AI to analyse tasting preferences across age ranges before crafting a series of beers with each in mind. The response from customers, according to reports, was resoundingly positive.
For now, AI in brewing is a data-based way of creating beer flavours with precision. Computers, used well, save time and improve consistency.
“We’ve been using computers to help us brew beer for a while now,” says Ali Ross, landlady at the Coach & Horses in Soho. “AI is good when it’s a tool for us, not a replacement for people. If we use AI to do the boring stuff, it frees up time to be creative.“I’m all for it in that sense and so I wouldn’t mind putting a beer on made by AI. But I do get why some people are concerned in the longer term. We know pubs are a huge part of life, of our culture. They’re places for people to get together. That’s what mustn’t be lost.”
Beer is an ancient drink, often made with old recipes. Perhaps so long as the craft and knowledge aren’t lost, AI would be no bad thing. After all, I wonder what the robots think of Madri?
