Machine learning boosts beer flavor

Scientists in Belgium have shown that machine learning could help make beer taste better, by predicting how to tweak a brew's chemical profile ( Nat. Commun. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46346-0 ). The system could be particularly useful for improving the taste of alcohol-free beers, says microbial geneticist Kevin J. Verstrepen of KU Leuven, who led the team. The complex taste of beer is shaped by thousands of different flavor compounds , and brewers have traditionally used expert tasting panels to judge the quality of their products. But group tasting sessions are slow, subjective, and expensive to run. So Verstrepen's team instead turned to online beer reviews and correlated those opinions with hard data about beer chemistry. The researchers used gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and other methods to profile more than 200 flavor compounds—along with pH, alcohol content, and other factors—in over 250 commercial Belgian beers, including blondes, tripels, and lagers. They also