St Austell Brewery has used artificial intelligence (AI) to help develop Hand Brewed by Robots, a 4.2% ABV ‘AI-PA’, as part of the Cask Club series.
Assistant brewing manager Barnaby Skerrett, who developed Hand Made by Robots, with a little help from AI
The recipe was created using an online generator. Barnaby Skerrett, assistant brewing manager, feed it instructions based on ingredients he wanted to use, and the beer flavours required.
Despite its digital recipe, the beer has been crafted by hand using St Austell Brewery’s small batch kit. The use of AI didn’t save the brewer any time, either. It was purely for novelty and for experimental purposes.
“The idea for the beer came from me working with AI tools in my general job with brewhouse automation,” said Barnaby. “As I was talking to the AI one day I thought I’d ask it a question about brewing to catch it out, as I was interested to see the results.
“I told it to write me a recipe on some broad parameters of colours and flavours, and it sent me some ideas. So I decided to turn them into a recipe. There were a couple of tweaks to make it cask appropriate, as it didn’t seem to know what cask was, which was quite interesting.”
The beer is packed with Willamette, Cascade, and Sulatana hops, will give a tropical juicy and resinous flavour.
“The other brewers think it’s quite funny — they all know I’m a bit of a nerd with computers, so they think it’s appropriate,” said Barnarby.
And he doesn’t think there’s any threat to brewing from AI in the future. “On the beer side, too much requires human input, whether that’s checking the ingredients and other quality checks that can’t be done by AI.
“It’s the same when the beer comes out the other side and we do tasting checks. AI can never properly tell you whether that beer tastes fantastic or if it’s not up to scratch.”
