When the Paths of Beer and Artificial Intelligence Collide

If we keep politics out of the equation, Belgium is quite a good country to live in. One of the nation's unique features ("USPs" if you like business lingo) is its rich beer making history. Central to this history is the "brewmaster." You can conceive of the latter as a professional who is part chemist and part artist. The reason is that brewmasters do not only control the brewing process of existing beer (making sure the beer does not develop an "off-flavor") but also create entirely new ones. In contrast to other countries (brewers in Germany long had to adhere to the "Reinheitsgebot" - limiting their creativity as the allowed ingredients for beer was limited), Belgians experimented away with lots of ingredients - leading to one of the highest varieties of beer in the world.

OK, but what does this have to do with data or artificial intelligence?

Funny but, per coincidence, I ran into an article that questioned whether AI would ever be able to replace the job of a brew master.

Short answer if you'd ask a Nemeonite: Yes.

Long answer: "It's complicated. ??" The reason is that if you consider brewmaster as a chemical operator, guaranteeing the quality of beer, it will most definitely be automated away. If you consider the artist/artisan, the story is more complex as it involves creativity (more difficult to automate). That being said, I do think that "hyper-personalization" will - in time - allow such control over chemical processes as to deliver each and everyone the beer he/she likes best entirely tailored to an individual taste.

For the geeks: what is the technology behind it? In many instances, we see that knowledge graph technology allows for chemical decision support systems. In short, the latter allow for better collaboration and feedback from process operators as well as automation of the chemical process. In fact, in a government-funded project, we linked knowledge graph technology to data from spectrometers (in lay terms: a spectrometer uses light to analyze properties of chemical substances) to assess the quality of food production lines in a cookie factory. In a similar fashion, the technology allows food producers to match ingredients in ways that cater to their target audiences ("foodpairing"). It is therefore not unthinkable, we'll see the technology get introduced in Michelin star restaurants (in due time).