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AI Beer

Scientists Turn To AI To Make Beer Taste Even Better 80

Posted by msmash from the real-benefits dept.
Researchers say they have used AI to make brews even better. From a report: Prof Kevin Verstrepen, of KU Leuven university, who led the research, said AI could help tease apart the complex relationships involved in human aroma perception. "Beer -- like most food products -- contains hundreds of different aroma molecules that get picked up by our tongue and nose, and our brain then integrates these into one picture. However, the compounds interact with each other, so how we perceive one depends also on the concentrations of the others," he said.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Verstrepen and his colleagues report how they analysed the chemical makeup of 250 commercial Belgian beers of 22 different styles including lagers, fruit beers, blonds, West Flanders ales, and non-alcoholic beers. Among the properties studied were alcohol content, pH, sugar concentration, and the presence and concentration of more than 200 different compounds involved in flavour -- such as esters that are produced by yeasts and terpenoids from hops, both of which are involved in creating fruity notes.

A tasting panel of 16 participants sampled and scored each of the 250 beers for 50 different attributes, such as hop flavours, sweetness, and acidity -- a process that took three years. The researchers also collected 180,000 reviews of different beers from the online consumer review platform RateBeer, finding that while appreciation of the brews was biased by features such as price meaning they differed from the tasting panel's ratings, the ratings and comments relating to other features -- such as bitterness, sweetness, alcohol and malt aroma -- these correlated well with those from the tasting panel.
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Scientists Turn To AI To Make Beer Taste Even Better More

Scientists Turn To AI To Make Beer Taste Even Better

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  • It is just fine the way it is. And bring back Michelob in the dark glass bottles. Some stuff doesn't need fixing.

  • Some truly useful AI research!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Add in blockchain, zero carbon footprint and a trans brew master (I mean brew expert) you'll have to fight off investor money.

      • trans brew master

        Depending on the demographic you're going for, an LGBTQ+ spokesperson can either help or hurt sales, but you can't flip-flop on it. I'd volunteer to do it, except I'm personally not much of a fan of alcohol and even less of a fan of beer (unless you're talking beer batter fried shrimp and onion rings, those are the bomb).

        "Hi, I'm your middle-aged gay spokesperson for AI beer. We didn't really have the budget for some famous queer influencer and quite frankly, I don't even drink this stuff, but you should,

      • Zero carbon?

        Dude, flat beer is the worst!

  • Then this study is designed to make Belgian beers - not beers in general - taste "better" ...

  • What do they mean "even" better? Beer tastes awful. There is a purpose to the taste "bitter" and making things taste good isn't it. More thousands of years of evolution than beer has existed for has made bitter the sense for things that poison you. That's why when you put a bitter berry in your mouth your first reaction is to spit it out.

    Name me someone who thought beer was good on the first try and I'll show you someone with third degree burns on their tongue. It's so ubiquitous as to be a joke that you give beer to a kid and watch his face twist.

    There is something intrinsically wrong with a drink that tastes so awful that bitter actually makes it better, and there is no amount of AI that can fix that.

    • Re:To Make Beer Taste Even Better.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @10:09PM (#64347567)

      What do they mean "even" better? Beer tastes awful. There is a purpose to the taste "bitter" and making things taste good isn't it. More thousands of years of evolution than beer has existed for has made bitter the sense for things that poison you. That's why when you put a bitter berry in your mouth your first reaction is to spit it out.

      Name me someone who thought beer was good on the first try and I'll show you someone with third degree burns on their tongue. It's so ubiquitous as to be a joke that you give beer to a kid and watch his face twist.

      There is something intrinsically wrong with a drink that tastes so awful that bitter actually makes it better, and there is no amount of AI that can fix that.

      You sound pretty bitter yourself.

      • You sound pretty bitter yourself.

        Not very palatable here either, is it? Or maybe I'm just an acquired taste that you just need to train yourself to like and after that you'll be hooked.

        Nah. Bitter just sucks.

        • You sound pretty bitter yourself.

          Not very palatable here either, is it? Or maybe I'm just an acquired taste that you just need to train yourself to like and after that you'll be hooked.

          Nah. Bitter just sucks.

          Oh, don't be so sensitive. I'm not even remotely bitter. Not about beer, life or career. I made a joke because you wrote bitter so many times.

    • Animals like alcohol. Humans are animals smart enough to have developed an intellectual fetish for it, but still dumb enough not to care about the negative effects.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        I bet you dont see the irony in your post at all relative to your favorite junk food.

        If all you enjoy in this life is things that are "good" for you you're going to have a pretty boring life.

        • Sensitive much?

          I am very aware that my post applied to myself as well as the rest of the species.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by skam240 ( 789197 )

            Sensitive much?

            "...dumb enough not to care about the negative effects." is oddly judgy given your response here and no one likes a Judgy Judy. Particularly given that the things we put in our bodies have merits outside of health concerns and there's nothing dumb about enjoying them based on those merits as long as you're not over doing it in a way that will cause you misery in other contexts.

    • Taste is subjective.

      Obviously, you personally ought to stick to drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. Meanwhile, you should let the hundreds of millions of people who think beer tastes just fine (hops and all) enjoy their beverage of choice.

      Pro tip: Most beers balance the bitterness with an appropriate amount of malt sweetness to create a pleasing overall effect for the average taster. This is similar to the way many mixed drinks balance sourness (another evolutionary poison alarm bell, OMG!) with swe

      • Taste is subjective.

        Obviously, you personally ought to stick to drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.

        These days the un-beers are the various hard seltzer drinks, which even the actual beer companies have gotten in on. They more-or-less taste like drinking a Bubly sparkling water around an opened can of PVC pipe cleaner.

      • Most beers do not managing a pleasing mix and are too sweet. But what do I know? I steeped my tea for a minimum of 20 minutes and used twice the normal measure (until I quit caffeine).

        Thatâ(TM)s the problem with this: AI isnâ(TM)t going to be able to satisfy everybodyâ(TM)s taste and will just create another mass-produced generic flavour.

      • >Obviously, you personally ought to stick to drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.

        The *early* bottled wine coolers were a way of disposing of the grapes which were too poor to use even in the popskull sold to winos.

        But then with the rise of California wines, those vineyards were replanted.

        For decades, now, they've been made with bleached beer, like zima. And the those other cocktails, seltzers, and stuff are basically the same thing.

        To make the alcohol, they mash malted barley (first step in beer)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      And the heat in spicy peppers was meant to keep animals from eating them and here we are today with many cultures embracing spicy food. As for liking it on the first try, there are plenty of foods that I enjoy today that I did not enjoy on my first try.

      I get you don't like a popular food item (I have popular items I dislike as well) but pretending your sense of taste is definitive in putting down such a massively popular beverage is just dumb. Clearly billions of people over the course of millennia didn't e

    • Amusingly, I gather they are looking to make it more appealing to the masses. That's why we had Zima. AI will quickly discover that people aren't primarily drinking beer for the flavor. Researchers will be shocked.

    • That's why when you put a bitter berry in your mouth your first reaction is to spit it out.

      Actually someone's first reaction was to see if they can distil that essence into a food additive and call it "bitters" to enhance the flavour of many things which are not bitter.

      Bitter is a fundamental flavour. If you removed it completely food would taste completely differently. Many of the things you like will have bitterness in them, even more bitterness than your post.

  • That's exactly my point. Exactly. Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.

  • It's easy, just add artificial flavoring. And when you look at the ingredients it looks like a chemistry set.

  • Now I understand "AI Risk"

  • Equivalence (Score:3)

    by The Cat ( 19816 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @11:54PM (#64347709)

    AI is the new blockchain.

    • AI is the new blockchain.

      No it's not. AI is actually proving useful in a variety of applications, while blockchain has to date achieved absolutely nothing.

      • > while blockchain has to date achieved absolutely nothing

        Blockchain has enabled a large number of financial scams. That is a real impact. Maybe blockchain has not done anything good...

  • Solution looking for a problem (Score:5, Funny)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @03:43AM (#64347869)
    Scientists: "Hey, we've got this amazing new technology that can find answers to previously intractable problems! However, it uses inordinate amounts of electricity so we should carefully consider what uses we put it to. Let's make the world a better place."

    Belgians: "OK, let's make beer taste slightly better."

  • "better" = "the same"? (Score:3)

    by votsalo ( 5723036 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @05:09AM (#64347937)
    Does "make beer taste better" mean "make all beers taste the same"? As with Why Every Coffee Shop Looks the Same [slashdot.org]?
  • Sounds like a way of finding the lowest common denominator in beer flavour and then making all beers taste just like that. I'll stick to home-brew.

  • AI can't taste the beer... (Score:3)

    by bsdetector101 ( 6345122 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @06:37AM (#64347997)
    The best beer is subjugtive to the drinker ! I used to drink Budweiser Black Crown until they discountinued it, smooth taste, no initial bite at first taste. I now drink Shiner Bock from a small Texan brewer that also has a smooth taste, no initial bite !
    • I grew up on Shiner Bock! While I now appreciate many different varieties and tend to prefer more complex flavors, I will always get me a Shiner anywhere that has it on tap.

    • The best beer is subjugtive to the drinker ! I used to drink Budweiser Black Crown

      I'm not sure what you were trying to say. On the one side I thought you meant beer is "subjective" to the drinker and made a typo, but since you mentioned Budweiser I think "subjugative" was actually the perfect Freudian slip you were aiming for.

  • in my experience (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @07:30AM (#64348077) Journal

    "Better" is a rather subjective thing, so I'm not sure how ai could help except to make predictive taste patterns for a single individual?

    In any case, these sorts of "experts" seem to be behind the fashionable modern trend for IPAs so you can count me out, thanks. I'm not a huge fan of my beer tasting EVEN MORE like grapefruit juice.

  • An individual brewer should have no problem coming up with a recipe that is somewhat close to their target. I would also imagine they can score a recipe numerically based on their own tastes. To me, it sounds like they should then be able to define all of the inputs (amounts of each barley/malt, hop type, other flavors, and times during each stage) and run it through an optimizer routine. Sure, the process would be iterative and may take a couple years, but with a good initial input and bounds on the inputs

  • I believe thatâ(TM)s half the number used in the reference group at Frauenhoff when they decided the MP3 masking function.
  • I wonder whether it's feasible to just add the required molecules to liquid in the correct proportion? Ie like making gin... if so, the next step would be vending machines with beer customized by the buyer. At last, a use for AI!

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