14 May 2020
4
Drinks
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DOCK STREET
BREWING CO. SWARM
INTELLIGENCE
At 4.9 percent ABV, this
drone-assisted pale ale
was brewed with local
orange blossom that’s
been fermented out,
leaving behind floral, fruity
notes and a taste of honey.
Ekuanot is the dominant
hop, but you can also taste
Mosaic and Chinook.MACKMYRA WHISKY
INTELLIGENS
This Swedish single-malt
whiskey, master blended
by AI with supervision
from D’Orazio, is described
as fruity, oaky, and slightly
salty with a dryish end.
Mackmyra used smaller
casks to produce a
concentrated flavor.BULLEIT BETA TEST
COCKTAIL
With the help of Austrian
tech company Print A
Drink, Bulleit Distilling Co.
developed the Beta Test, a
light and fruity 3D-printed
cocktail. A robotic arm
injects suspended beads
of colored lemon oil into
a mix of Bulleit bourbon,
peach and grape juices,
and green tea.CHAMPION BREWING
ML AI
A Charlottesville, Virginia,
brewery partnered with a
machine learning company
to create ML AI, an IPA
with 6 percent ABV. The
AI model used parameters
that included IPAs judged
at the Great American
Beer Festival, the 10 best-
selling IPAs in the country,
and the 10 worst-selling
IPAs at a local retailer.A Closer
Look
at Robot-
Generated
Beverages
▶ cognitive services and fed them
Mackmyra’s existing recipes,
cask types, sales data, customer
reviews, and tasting notes.
The models could generate
more than 70 million high-
quality recipes. Master blender
Angela D’Orazio reviewed hun-
dreds of them until she landed on
five to test in her laboratory. She
then chose the best of the batch, a
blend now known as Intelligens,
which was released in September
2019 (though we’re still waiting
on the stateside launch).
“What a program like this can
do is process a lot more [recipe]
possibilities per second than
a human brain can ever do,”
D’Orazio says. But human
senses, especially taste and smell,
remain irreplaceable. “Human
context is needed,” she says. “I
was involved in every step—I
decided on the recipe, I chose the
casks.” Although Mackmyra is
the first to use a human-machine
collaboration in the distilling
process, D’Orazio expects this
partnership to proliferate in the
future. In fact, several breweries
have already done so.
Dock Street Brewing Co. in
Philadelphia has used robots not
to develop f lavors but instead to
help in the brewing process.
The brewery partnered with its
neighbor Exyn Technologies—
which specializes in drones for
GPS-denied industrial envi-
ronments, such as mines—to
create Swarm Intelligence, a
pale ale that was released in
late January. Dock Street says
the new brew is the world’s first
drone-assisted beer.
“Since [the drones] are auton-
omous, they can take on a variety
of tasks, unlike a piece of brew-
ing equipment that was designed
to do one thing, one way, and if
it breaks, it breaks,” says Renata
Certo-Ware, head of events and
marketing for Dock Street.
“Drones are more intuitive and
able to be programmed and
re-programmed in a way that is
much more amenable to trouble-
shooting and being used for mul-
tiple tasks.”
Dock Street head brewer
Mark Russell says the brewery
and Exyn initially discussed
using drones to deliver beer, but
the autonomous aerial robots
can only hold so much weight.
They chose instead to use a
drone to add hops into the brew-
ing kettles.
“On our scale, we’re very
much still hands-on,” Russell
says. “This isn’t going to revolu-
tionize our brewing. It was more
just a fun thing for us to do. But
creating a consistent product is
always the goal for brewers, and
anytime you can remove human
error, that’s great.”THE DISTILLERY USED MACHINE
LEARNING MODELS AND FED
T H E M E X I S T I N G R E C I P E S, C A S K
TYPES, SALES DATA, CUSTOMER
REVIEWS, AND TASTING NOTES.