If you’ve ever thought that your alcohol should be more technologically advanced, and not just made by pesky humans, then Bristol distillery Circumstance may just have the gin for you.
Working with Tiny Grant and Rewrite Digital the distillery created ‘Ginette’ – an artificial intelligence neural network capable of creating her own gin from scratch, including recipe, name and label.
The technology was launched at the Bristol Technology Festival and has been trained to analyse hundreds of botanicals, understand gin recipes and ‘learn’ a database of more than 500 gin names in order to create an AI spirit.
Danny Walker co-owner of Circumstance Distillery said Monker’s Garkel was a collaborative experiment with scientists to see how modern technology could help draw inspiration to create an original product.
After a variety of computations and considerations, the name ‘Ginette’ came up with was…Monker’s Garkel. Of course, the name is nowhere as important as the taste.
For that, ‘Ginette’ settled on juniper berry, coriander seed, angelica root, raspberry leaf, gooseberry, prune, clementine zest, orange zest and marigold as the botanicals used to create the ‘fragranced’ gin.
“Ginette came up with ingredients which we have not used before in gin production. Marigold was hard to source,” Walker said.
“The naming and labelling was a combination of machine and human input,” he said
An automated algorithm created the bottle labels using a curated set of styles, colours, textures and fonts, which were then formulated by local Bristol artist, Tim Sutcliffe.
Interestingly, although AI came up with the recipe, none of the production of the gin was automated. As with normal gin, it was made in 30-litre pot stills by hand.
“At present, they are not a substitute for the skill of the distiller, but we have clearly shown that they can make a valuable contribution to all aspects of the development process, from the recipe to the naming and labelling,” notes Liam Hirt, co-founder of Circumstance Distillery.
“We trained Ginette well, and with a little human help and guidance, her product is interesting, attractive and, most importantly, delicious.”
Describing themselves as ‘new world’ distillers, Circumstance believes they have created a ‘new world’ spirit that will ‘go beyond your normal expectations.’
The first batch has been limited to 1,000 bottles which will be available through Master of Malt & the distillery’s sister brand Psychopomp Microdistillery
