The Rise of Beer Made by AI

When Beck's, a storied German brewery founded in the city of Bremen in 1873, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2023, it decided to bring in a new brewmaster to mark the occasion: ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

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The AB-InBev-owned brand asked it to whip up a recipe using only hops, yeast, water, and malt. The result was "Beck's Autonomous", a lager with a subtle sweetness, a hoppy texture, and quite a head. One Daily Mail reporter considered it better than the brewery's standard lager.

Beer and AI may seem an unlikely pairing, but Beck's is far from the only brand to have asked for input from the technology. Atwater Brewery, an American firm, introduced an AI-designed citrusy India pale ale (IPA) in 2023 and last year St. Austell Brewery in Britain used AI to create a tropical IPA dubbed "Hand Brewed by Robots".

In March, Coedo Brewery in Japan asked an AI model to analyze the preferences of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and then developed four craft beers, one for each age range. In general, the response from customers, brewers say, has been overwhelmingly positive.