The rise of beer made by AI

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 analyse 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.

“It gives us access to new recipes that we didn’t think about before," says Prinz Pinakatt, boss of the beer business for Tilray Brands, Atwater’s New York-based parent company. Machine-learning tools can parse the minutiae of complex flavours, analyse the ingredients and equipment that an individual brewery has available, and then concoct new recipes while tweaking sweetness, acidity, hop level and other attributes to ensure the end product appeals to discerning customers.

Beau Warren, who opened the Species X Beer Project brewery in America in 2021, knows this firsthand. In 2022 he started training AI models on a number of parameters—his proprietary recipes, different types of yeast, water acidity, various hops, the ingredients in the brewery cellar, the typical makeup of lagers, stouts and other beers—and, by 2024, began using it to guide the brewing process. In one instance, after being asked to make a new lager, the bot suggested mixing Maris Otter malt, usually found in stouts, with Belgian candi syrup. “I would never have thought of doing that in a lager, ever," he says. “We brewed it anyway, and I thought it was one of the best lagers I’ve ever made." His customers apparently thought the same: Mr Warren says patrons usually rated the AI-crafted beers better than any of the beers thought up by he and his fellow brewers. (That said, the AI beers at Species X are no more: the brewery closed down last autumn owing to financial difficulties.)

Scientists are also intrigued about what bots might tell them about the chemistry of beer. In 2024 researchers from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, analysed the chemical makeup of 250 Belgian beers, including lagers, blonds and West Flanders ales. They then trained machine-learning algorithms to model the effects of adding or subtracting different aroma compounds, such as glycerol and lactic acid, on the taste. “The models we develop help us to understand the complex relationship between the chemistry of a beer, its taste, and how consumers will like it," says Kevin Verstrepen, a bioscience engineer who led the research team.

Of course, it will take more than a chatbot to replace a human brewer. Ingredients must be poured, brew kettles must be tended and the beers must be tasted—whether they were made totally by human hands, or brewed, at least in part, by robots. “Yes, AI will become more and more part of the brewing process, but the brewing itself, the craft, is still the emphasis," says Mr Pinakatt. “It will be very difficult to have machines make our beers."

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