The gin Monker’s Garkel uses juniper berry, coriander seed, angelica root, raspberry leaf, gooseberry, prune, clementine zest, orange zest, and marigold: and has an ABV of 40%.
A collaboration between technology scientists Tiny Giant and Rewrite Digital created Ginette: a neural network that is the ‘brains’ behind Monker’s Garkel.
Trained to analyse thousands of botanicals, understand gin recipes and learn a database of more than 500 gin names, Ginette went through a process of creating a huge catalogue of brand names, designs and botanical recipes before deciding on ‘Monker’s Garkel’.
Ginette also had a say in the label and marketing. An automated algorithm created the labels using a curated set of styles, colours, textures and fonts, which was then formulated by local artist Tim Sutcliffe.
The copy on the label and Ginette's communication on social, @GGinmaker is written by a neural network based on the Open AI GPT-2 language model.
Liam Hirt, co-founder of 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.”
Monker's Garkel was launched at the Bristol Technology Festival earlier this month, and will be served at MAD//FEST in London next week.
Earlier this year, Swedish distillery Mackmyra launched the world's first whisky created using artificial intelligence in a collaboration with Finnish technology company Fourkind, based on the Microsoft Azure platform.
