AI has definitely brought crazy changes in today’s development world. From education to health, business to medicine, researches have started to add technology everywhere, making the sector nothing but the most powerful. But nobody ever saw AI whiskey, did they? Yes, you’ve read it right. The world turned its head when Microsoft announced the world’s first whiskey powered by artificial intelligence in collaboration with Swedish distillery Mackmyra Whisky, technology company Fourkind.
Is that supposed to be an ‘oh yeah!’ or an ‘oops’?
well, let’s find out.
Whiskeys spend at least three years aging in wooden casks. Twelve years is taken into account the minimum for good scotch. The age and kind of wood utilized in the cask encompass a direct impact on flavor, but a lot of the nuances of a fine whisky can actually come from generations of spirits, of different varieties, leaving their unique aromas and blends behind.
Hence, with a million possibilities to make one bottle of scotch, it is almost impossible to find out other ways to find the recipes to make a cup of whiskey. So, microsoft came up with a project, that’s to find new combinations of methods and ingredients to make whiskey that humans can’t think of. In other words, the algorithm is capable of coming up with combinations of flavours, that human blenders may not have been able to come up with. The website says that the whiskey is golden yellow in colour. As for its smell, it has notes of “toffee & cream vanilla, fine oloroso tones and fruit with citrus, pear & apples. Herbal notes of aniseed, ginger and white pepper and a light tone of toasted oak casks.” The whisky is fruity and oaky, slightly salty with a ‘dryish end’, informs Mackmyra’s website.
“We perpetually try to challenge the traditions within the terribly ancient John Barleycorn trade, and that’s something we really do now when we develop a whiskey with the help of AI. We see AI as a part of our digital development, it is really exciting to let AI be a complement to the craft of producing a high-quality whiskey” says Angela D’Orazio from Mackmyra.
The whisky was reportedly presented at the tech conference ‘The Next Web 2019’ in Amsterdam, Netherlands. According to the information available about the whisky on Mackmyra’s website, “Currently, the distillery’s machine learning models, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and AI cognitive services, are fed with Mackmyra’s existing recipes (including those for victory blends), sales data, and customer preferences. With this knowledge set the AI will generate over seventy million recipes that it predicts are fashionable, and of the highest quality based on what kind of cask types there are in the warehouse.”
Microsoft also introduced the unique Artificial Intelligence-generated whisky blend through a blog post on their website, titled, “Meet the world’s first AI-created whiskey”. The post aforementioned, “Master Distillers will pay their whole lives meticulously tasting, tweaking and experimenting to make the most effective flavours attainable, turning acts of chemistry into a variety of art – and this is where Mackmyra wants AI to work its magic.” What this path-breaking creation will lead to in terms of further innovation in the field of alcohol distillation, still remains to be seen.
