Meet RoboBEER

Meet RoboBEER, a robotic beer pourer.

As you know, the demand for high quality beers worldwide has exploded over the last few decades. What drives quality? Well one way to discern quality is to objectively characterize features within the beer.

What features you may ask? Some of them are visual, like the color and foam-ability, such as maximum volume of foam, total lifetime of foam, foam drainage, size of the bubbles in the foam. But not just any idiot can pour the beer, as a Guinness lover will tell you, since a good pour is crucial. Fortunately RoboBEER can pull the ‘perfect’ pint: RoboBEER pulls 80 mL (+/- 10 mL) while monitoring the liquid temperature, assessing the alcohol and CO2 levels, all through your kids Arduino control board and a Matlab interface (yeay Matlab!).  

But what about more important features like taste? Surely no robot could do that right? No way. But… maybe you could predict things like mouthfeel from all the features obtained in by RoboBEER? You could capture descriptions of taste from experts through a questionnaire: 10 basic categories: bitter, sweet, sour, aroma in grains, aroma in hops, aroma in yeast, viscosity, astringency, carbonation mouthfeel, and flavor hops. Then, have them sample twenty-two beers. (What I would do to be a part of this study!)

Could you train a neural network to predict what the beer would taste like just based off the data from RoboBEER?

A ‘feedforward’ neural network was designed where, essentially, you take all the inputs from the RoboBEER (head size, color, etc), and the outputs from the tasters (bitterness, sweetness, mouthfeel) and see if a neural network can predict the taste based on those inputs. You do some fun math like principal component analysis to help with sorting all the data and patterns, pump them into the network for AI training and what do you get?

For the independent testing data, the AI system from RoboBEER data could predict what it a beer would taste like with an accuracy of 86%. What does this mean? Well… very likely, RoboBEER is a better judge of beer than you are. And it doesn’t even have to taste the beer.

Don’t believe me? Read for yourself.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1750-3841.14114