Artifex Releases

Beer ‘Created by AI, Brewed by Humans’

BY C. JAYDEN SMITH

The expanded availability of artificial intelligence (AI) software has allowed the public to test AI’s ability to write anything, from short stories to social media captions. San Clemente’s Artifex Brewing team recently decided to take that to the next level by releasing a new beer recipe written by computer technology.

The “A.I.pa,” a West Coast IPA in the tradition of the company’s brewing style, was released to the public in a limited sample size at the company’s two taprooms in town late last month.

Artifex co-owner and head brewer Johnny Johur told San Clemente Times that the idea to use the service ChatGPT originated while the team was hanging out one day after work and chatting about the exploding popularity of AI. They initially wanted to get a basic understanding of the software’s capabilities, taking it further after receiving an encouraging first recipe draft.

“It started out as just, ‘Hey, can you write a beer recipe?’, and it wrote a beer recipe,” Johur said. “Then we said, ‘Hey, can you write a unique recipe that no one’s written before?’, and it did that.”

The process led them “down a rabbit hole,” Johur added, as they continued to ask the AI to do increasingly intricate tasks in creating a recipe that could be produced. The final result was a unique recipe profile and combination of ingre- dients that only required minor tweaks from the brewers to help scale the quantity to Artifex’s equipment.

Included in the A.I.pa are 2-Row and Pilsner malts, and Amarillo, Cascade, Mosaic and Simcoe hops, all from the Pacific Northwest. ChatGPT also wrote out the schedule in which Artifex would include the ingredients, matching up almost completely with the actual format used.

Most of the process went smoothly, according to Johur, but the computer did have trouble using the terminology familiar to the brewers in terms of writing out quantities.

“I’m brewing a 15-barrel batch, (and) it was equating stuff into gallons and pounds and not barrels,” he said. “There was some miscommunication, I guess