Microsoft has announced that it has teamed up with Finnish Tech Company Fourkind and Sweden-based distillery Mackmyra Whisky to create the world’s first whisky developed with AI. As part of the distillation process, whiskey is kept in charred wooden casks from some years.
This turns the clear liquor a darker colour, and gives it a unique flavour. How long it stays in the casks, and what the casks held before — like bourbon, wine, sherry, etc. — helps create a specific recipe. Earlier, Master distillers would come up with a variety of blends by tweaking all these variables along with the different ingredients.
For the AI blend, Mackmyra is designating a part of the job to the machines. The distillery is feeding its existing recipes, sales data and customer preferences to machine learning models, so that the AI can suggest what recipes (almost 70) it should make next.
