Meet Mackmyra – proudly presenting the world’s first whisky created with AI!
A true disruptor is Swedish whisky distillery Mackmyra. September 3rd Mackmyra launched the first ever whisky created by (or at least with the help of) artificial intelligence, a golden yellow single malt called Intelligens.
A state of the art story on innovation and exploration, timing, tech and taste.
The project is a cooperation between Mackmyra, Microsoft and Finnish tech company Fourkind that has built an AI engine that can generate more than 70 million recipes and predict their quality and popularity… At Sime you will get the full story, all the details and a taste of golden future!
Hello there, Susanne Tedsjö, Project Manager at Mackmyra, tell us what it’s all about?
–At Mackmyra we love to challenge traditional ways of doing things and to explore new possibilities, so when we came up with the idea of blending a whisky with the help of AI, it felt just right!
How did you come up with the idea?
–It was quite a coincidence. Epicenter, where we have our office, is a place with many tech companies around, and a lot of exciting projects going on. Not a typical spot for a whisky distillery, but we like the vibe and the fact that you run into new things and try them out. It was over a lunch with some guys from Microsoft that we started to discuss what could be done with tech and AI and whisky. Would it be possible to create tastes based on data? We loved the idea and decided to try, but we didn’t realize that the interest would be that big. The whiskey was pre launched in Amsterdam in May, and the interest has been huge!
How do you like the whisky?’
–I think it’s great!
What are your takeaways from the project?
–The most fun is realizing what you can achieve with enthusiastic people aboard, with the right energy. Taking a crazy idea from a lunch into a real product! It’s also been really rewarding to work with a new dimension, for all of us i think. For us tech is totally new and our partners hadn’t been dealing with taste before.
What will we learn at Sime?
–I will share some lessons from the project, together with our Master Blender Angela D’Orazio and our partner Jarmo Virtanen from Fourkind, who can describe in detail how AI has been used.
