IntelligentX Brewing and AI beer

by Startacus Admin

Beer that learns! Beer recipes that adapt to the consumer using AI thanks to IntelligentX Brewing and their AI beer!

Beer. What else can we say? You know what it is. It isn’t a problem to be solved. But it is quite nice. Or it’s terrible. It all depends on the recipe that the brewer uses and whether or not they take into account the tastes of their customers.

Taking feedback, collating it, looking for patterns in it, and then implementing what makes sense, however, is a time-consuming process - time that could otherwise be used on brewing and creating new flavours. So what is the happy medium? In 2018, you won’t be surprised to read the words: Artificial Intelligence.

London-based IntelligentX is the result of a meeting of 10x, an innovation and creative agency, and Intelligent Layer, a machine learning company.

This machine learning comes heavily into play, as the artificial intelligence needs to learn and adapt. When a customer gets a bottle of AI beer, they can input a Facebook Messenger code and answer the artificial intelligence’s questions about the beer: what you thought of it, what it could use more or less of, what your usual tastes are, etc.

The AI then takes all of this data and uses it to deliver a new recipe to the brewers (who are, in fact, human). The brewers can, of course, reject the recipe if the AI delivers them something they think can’t work, and so it learns.

A process of trial and error sees the AI introducing one of 1,000 ‘wildcard’ ingredients into a recipe purely to see if it will work. It may improve the beer or it may detract from it. Either way, the AI and the brewers have learned, and they could potentially have made the world’s best beer by accident.

The four beers - Golden, Amber, Pale, and Black - are currently available from UBrew in Bermondsey and, soon, directly to your door so you can be a connoisseur from your own home. And if you are a home brewer, the beers are open source - their recipes are available online for every iteration of every beer, so even if your favourite has gone through an iteration that took it in a different direction, you can still make it yourself.

Of course, beer isn’t the end goal. IntelligentX wants the technology to become more widely used, improving and tailoring all sorts of products. They suggest the likes of chocolate, perfume, and Startacus lifeblood, coffee.

Backed by Techstars, whose accelerator they have also been through, IntelligentX represents an interesting new angle of allowing customers to become a part of a, if not designing, then refining process for their favourite products.

While we aren’t talking individual, customised products (although we certainly could be), the idea that the, say, coffee you are drinking is the best of everything coffee lovers want is one we’ll drink to.

If you like AI focused startups, you want want to read up on:

Artomatix uses AI to help 3D artists create

Small Robot Company offers farming through small robots not big tractors

 
 

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• #ai
• #intelligentx brewing
• #techstars
• #ai beer
• #machine learning
• #

Published on: 17th November 2018