Welcome our Whiskey Robot Overlords!

June 16, 2021

To say that whiskey-making is time-consuming is, of course, a colossal understatement. It generally takes a minimum of three years to age a good whiskey and up to 12 years for good scotch. And what if you make a mistake with the recipe? I can lose a whole afternoon if I accidentally put too much salt on my eggs. I can’t imagine finding out after a 12-year wait that you added too much of something or not enough of something else and your creation is inedible.

But now, for the first time ever, a whiskey recipe has been almost fool-proofed by using Artificial Intelligence. How it works is this: by comparing successful recipes with sales data and what customers say they like, the algorithm can then come up with a new recipe that has a higher likelihood of turning out well. The AI can actually generate more than 70 million recipes that it predicts will be popular. Combine this with old-fashioned techniques like cask-aging, and bam, artificially created whiskey.

The Sweden-based Mackmyra Distillery will be the first to bring this computer-created whiskey to market, and you can get your hands on a bottle right now. But don’t let the technology take all the credit, any whiskey, scotch or bourbon is only as good as the Master Distiller that determines exactly when it’s ready. The computer with taste buds hasn’t been perfected.