Forget The Hops, AI Bots Could Brew Your Next Favorite Beer

Conversing with an AI-powered chatbot or trying to beat it at chess can be fun and all, but researchers, scientists, and engineers have much bigger aspirations for artificial intelligence. You know, like brewing the perfect beer, as it turns out. Before anyone scoffs, brewing beer is serious business, and also a good challenge for AI training.

Humans seemingly have the advantage for these kinds of tasks because of taste buds, and because we've been playing around with alcohol since nearly the beginning of the time. Even so, it's apparently possible to tap AI to become a brew master, as researchers in Belgium outline in a study published to Nature. In it, they discuss the "challenging" science of dealing with flavors.

"For each beer, we measure over 200 chemical properties, perform quantitative descriptive sensory analysis with a trained tasting panel and map data from over 180,000 consumer reviews ...