The ongoing advances of technology in the food and drinks industry continues to be a great source of inspiration, as the collaboration of UK's Circumstance Distillery with Tiny Giant and Rewrite Digital goes to show, utilising artificial intelligence called Ginette to specially craft a new gin.
Monker's Garkel is the result of this futuristic conception, named by the AI from a database of 500 gins, as well as the array of botanicals and recipes in existence in order to produce a creation which it describes as a fragrant spirit.
Even the creation of the branding and design was conceived by the artificial intelligence, selecting a variety of textures, colours and fonts which were then realised to full potential by the artist Tim Sutcliffe.
Liam Hirt, co-founder of Bristol-based Circumstance Distillery, said: "AI and machine learning are exciting new tools. We do a lot of contract distilling and wanted to know if these tools could make a meaningful contribution to new product development.
"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. We trained Ginette well, and with a little human help and guidance, her product is interesting, attractive and, most importantly, delicious."
Kerry Harrison, co-founder of Tiny Giant, added: "We've loved every minute of this project. The creation of Monker's Garkel has demonstrated that it's perfectly possible to align machine predictive power and human creativity to make something delicious, valuable and commercial."
For more regarding the use of artificial intelligence within the food and drink industry, we covered this in a recent report here.