Spirits & Liqueurs

Details Written by Dulwich Reporter Dulwich Reporter Published: 10 November 2019 10 November 2019

This new combination of marine learning and human creativity have demonstrated that by analysing hundreds of botanicals properties against recipes and 500 gin brands, Ginette was able to conjure the name Monger’s gargle and produce a “fragranced gin drink”.

Monker’s Garkel is created using Juniper berry, coriander seed, angelica root, raspberry leaf, gooseberry, prune, clementine zest, orange zest, and marigold with an abv of 40%.

Trained by the team 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’.

Circumstance Distillery are gearing up to launch the world’s first gin created using an artificial intelligence (AI) programme. A complex gin developed by a neural network.

A collaboration with Technology scientists Tiny Giant and Rewrite Digital, who have designed and built the AI, she is called ‘Ginette’ a neural network and is the ‘brains’ behind ‘Monker’s Garkel’.

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. A human then organises the output, which can automate a process if needs be.

Liam Hirt, co-founder of Circumstance Distillery commented “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.”

“We’ve loved every minute of this project,” said Kerry Harrison, co-founder of Tiny Giant. “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".

Launched during The Bristol Technology Festival (2nd to the 9th. November) on the 5th November at the I’ll Be Back South West event at the Square Club in Bristol, guests will be able to try the new AI gin and meet the team as they dive into this relatively unexplored world.

Monker's Garkel will also be served at MAD//FEST in London on 13 November.

Monker’s Garkel Website: https://aigin.io

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