Practical Uses Of AI: Keeping Up With New Craft Beer Names

Two things cannot be denied today:

1. The potential impact of Artificial intelligence grows every day
2. The selection of craft beers in Ireland is astonishing

Now, watch as I spin these two completely separate topics into one.

The Incredible Growth Of Craft Beers In Ireland

It’s estimated that Ireland has 90 microbreweries creating sweet tasty craft beers. That’s a whopping four-times the number from 2012. That’s why your recent trip to the off-licence was like browsing an old style sweet shop.

With so many craft beers on the market, off-license fridges are jam-packed with a multitude of colourful cans and bottles. Even more creative than the packaging is many of the beers’ names. Everything from Galway Bay’s Of Foam and Fury to White Gypsy American Pale Ale, it’s only a matter of time until we run out of beer names. Unless… unless we become superhuman.

Using AI To Name Craft Beers

Janelle Shane is one of those amazing nerds who learns incredible skills but uses them for fun. We love her because she makes new technology like AI really relatable, using it to name Pokémon and create ancient proverbs. One of her latest experiments uses neural networks to generate names for craft beers. She was inspired to try this out after she read that US microbreweries are genuinely struggling to create new names for their craft beers.

Neural networks are really similar to artificial intelligence. They learn from huge collections of data to generate new material. For example, Janelle used hundreds of thousands of beer names in this experiment. Here are our favourites from the list of AI generated craft beer names:

IPA: Toe Deal

The beautiful fragrance of feet with the rush of gambling. Toe Deal would be a beautiful IPA should it exist. Personally, that’s one of my favourite labels too. Look at him there. Big toe dealer.

 

Strong Pale Ale: Third Maus

Surely the one and only Deadmau5 could license a few crates of this for his next tour?

 

Amber Ales: Ricia’s Donkey Brain

Some say Ricia’s developed the recipe for her Amber Ales by accident after blowing up a stil.

Stouts: Sir Coffee

All the class of a craft beer crossed with the subtlety of a Starbucks Coffee. Sir Coffee is the choice of craft beer drinkers who need a nap.

Stouts: Black Sink Stout

The pint of choice for plumbers around Ireland. Ironically, Black Sink Stout will do fierce damage to your plumbing.

Stouts: Pimperdiginistic The Blacksmith W/ Cherry Stout

Running local prostitution rings is a dying trade, which leaves many pimps branching out into other areas, like shoeing horses and shaping replica swords.

Stouts: Cherry Coconut Mint Chocolate Stout

Bless the machine learning powered neural networks for this effort. It’s like they wrapped a bottle in velcro and chucked it into a barrel of craft beer related words. The result: Cherry Coconut Mint Chocolate Stout. A mouthful to say but I’d imagine that’s the only mouthful you’ll experience with this drunk.

IPA: Yamquak

Ok, so we took liberties with this one. First of all, yes yams are practically sweet potatoes. No, they don’t quack, but the chance to place a beak on a yam was just too much for me to ignore.

What do you think of AI’s attempts to name craft beers? Personally, I think they did pretty good. You can read the full list over on Janelle’s site where she let’s neural networks be weird. Let us know in the comments what you think, or if you could do better yourself.