Scientists Turn To AI To Make Beer Taste Even Better

Researchers say they have used AI to make brews even better. From a report: Prof Kevin Verstrepen, of KU Leuven university, who led the research, said AI could help tease apart the complex relationships involved in human aroma perception. 'Beer -- like most food products -- contains hundreds of different aroma molecules that get picked up by our tongue and nose, and our brain then integrates these into one picture. However, the compounds interact with each other, so how we perceive one depends also on the concentrations of the others,' he said.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Verstrepen and his colleagues report how they analysed the chemical makeup of 250 commercial Belgian beers of 22 different styles including lagers, fruit beers, blonds, West Flanders ales, and non-alcoholic beers. Among the properties studied were alcohol content, pH, sugar concentration, and the presence and concentration of more than 200 different compounds involved in flavour -- such as esters that are produced by yeasts and terpenoids from hops, both of which are involved in creating fruity notes.

A tasting panel of 16 participants sampled and scored each of the 250 beers for 50 different attributes, such as hop flavours, sweetness, and acidity -- a process that took three years. The researchers also collected 180,000 reviews of different beers from the online consumer review platform RateBeer, finding that while appreciation of the brews was biased by features such as price meaning they differed from the tasting panel's ratings, the ratings and comments relating to other features -- such as bitterness, sweetness, alcohol and malt aroma -- these correlated well with those from the tasting panel.

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