The Makmira company has been distilling whiskey for twenty years, so in order to celebrate that, they decided to deliver something truly special to the world.
This sentence begins the description of the cooperation between a whiskey distillery in Sweden and a company that develops IT solutions, but the same sentence could serve as the beginning of a horror story. Because what followed for many represents sheer terror.
Some would frown when they hear that someone in Sweden makes whiskey, even a good one, but since kraft is the production of beer, wine and fierceness has become very popular in the world, it does not necessarily have to be bad. But at Makmira, they thought that on the occasion of the distillery's 20th anniversary, which was five years ago, they entered into cooperation with the company "Fourkind" (which transformed into "Thoughtworks", if you search for it online) and made the first AI blended whiskey in the world . The bottom line is that making grain spirits isn't much of a science, but getting the flavor right is. It is necessary to know what kind of barrel the drink is poured into, what other distillates it is mixed with, how much and under what conditions it is kept, decanted, etc. This process is called blending or blending, and it depends on whether a whiskey will cost ten dollars or ten thousand dollars per bottle.
The team from "Thoughtworks" measured everything possible, tested, tried and finally came to the product, whiskey that was mixed by a computer instead of a blend master.
The whiskey is called “Macmyra Intelligence AI” and already has version 2.0. The price is not displayed on the website, but the whiskey of this brand costs between fifty and one hundred euros per bottle, so the "intelligence" could probably find a place there. On the website they say that it smells of soft smoke and cedar with a touch of raspberry, the taste is vanilla, pine and cider, it has a long finish which draws on chocolate and lemon, which those who judge whiskey understand.
With the fact that they are no longer necessary because AI has intervened there as well. The Fraunhofer Institute in Karlsruhe and its researchers Helen Haug and Andreas Grasskamp have developed a computerized whiskey tasting that distinguishes the five basic aromas of this drink better than live tasters, at least that's what the experiment showed. They also tested it to see if it can distinguish Scotch from American whiskey and it turned out that in 90 percent of cases it does so successfully, again better than the majority of tasters. The analysis is performed by chromatography and mass spectrometry, the obtained data feed into the database, which is supplemented by human experience. What the Karlsruhe scientists see as an advantage of machines over humans is consistency. A computer has no subjective feeling that would hinder it from making a judgment about the drink it tries, unlike a human.
Neither whiskey synthesists nor analysts think their algorithm should replace master blenders and whiskey tasters. According to them, this is just a good auxiliary tool that can serve tasters to calibrate their own taste, and masters to play around and try out much more possibilities than is the case now.
Whiskey is just the beginning, expect AI to move into the kitchen soon, where new technology (teflon, microwaves) has been reigning for decades. An imaginable scenario is where you scan the QR code on the meat package that contains all the information about the food and then you put the meat in the oven, which, with the help of AI programming, prepares it in an optimal way, just the way you like it, perfectly every time.
Scientists in Serbia have to choose whether they will opt for the production of brandy or sauerkraut, both processes are challenging and require a multidisciplinary approach.
