We have a few whiskey fans in our office so when we heard
about AI whiskey, we had to share.
Microsoft announced last week that they have teamed up with Finnish tech company Fourkind and
Sweden-based distillery Mackmyra Whiskey to create the world’s first AI-developed
whiskey.
Compared to brewing beer, the process of creating whiskey
has endless possibilities due to the countless combinations available. From
distilling in different casks, time spent in the casks, and many factors
regarding ingredients, Master Distillers and Blenders spend their entire lives
experimenting to discover magical flavour combinations.
The largest challenge for Masters is that whiskey needs to
spend at least three years – usually much longer – in casks to create that
special flavour infusion. While Master Distillers may have a good idea of what the
final result will be as they can never be certain.
With this challenge in mind, we wanted to know the purpose
of this partnership and Mackmyra explained the following:
“We want to discover recipes that will never have
occurred to a person.”
The purpose of AI in whiskey development is for augmenting
and automating flavour combinations based on existing award-winning recipes,
sales data, and customer preferences. The result will be new recipes that will
be popular and win awards.
The AI, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and
Azure cognitive services, can use the information inputted from Mackmyra to
produce more than 70 million recipes for the Mackmyra team to leverage.
Mackmyra hopes that the AI will come up with innovative
combinations that they would otherwise not have thought of and use their human
expertise and senses to
make the final decision.
Microsoft says this is the first time AI has been used to
augment the process of making whiskey and it will begin producing recipes in
Fall 2019.
Initially we thought it was gimmicky, though the idea of AI
whiskey has begun to grow on us and we’re looking forward to tasting the
results!
If you'd like to dive deeper into this trio's project, head over to Mackmyra AI Whisky.