PEAKLIFE

Mackmyra Whisky with the help of Microsoft has introduced AI in the process of whisky making.

Tracing back to the first existence of whisky, 15th century is undoubtedly long ago. The art of distillation spread from Arabs to Greeks to Latins and then to Ireland & Scotland, who used it to produce alcohol. The earliest mention of whisky is found to be in Ireland in the 17th century. Since then, whisky’s production has involved Distillation, Aging & Packaging, and now welcomes Artificial Intelligence.

Finnish tech company Fourkind & Microsoft, together with Sweden based Mackmyra Whisky is creating the world’s first whisky developed with artificial intelligence (AI). Mackmyra Whisky was founded in 1999 and has won several international awards, and its Master Blender has recently been inducted in to Whisky Magazine’s hall of fame. The distiller’s ambitions have reached further by introducing AI as a part of their digital development.

According to Microsoft ” Currently, the distiller’s machine learning models, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform & Azure cognitive services, are fed with Mackmyra’s existing recipes, sales data, and customer preferences. With this dataset the AI can generate more than 70 million recipes that it predicts will be popular, and of the highest quality based on what kind of cask types there are in the warehouse. This is the first time that AI has been used to augment & automate the most time-consuming process of whisky creation.” 

However, we will still be benefitted by expertise & knowledge of a human, especially the human sensory part that can never be replaced by any program. “We believe that the whisky is AI-generated, but human-curated.” says Master Blender D’Orazio.

Mackmyra’s AI-generated whisky will be available from Autumn 2019.

Soon this development in technology will produce its effects on different industries globally. But as far as AI whisky is concerned, Will you drink to that?