Blindman Brewing & Amii

Transcript

SHANE GROENDAHL: My name is Shane Groendahl, and I'm from Blindman Brewing here in Lacombe, Alberta. We're one of the only breweries using machine learning to help us answer questions about our carbon footprint and our CO2 recapture process.

Breweries are very carbon-intensive: we use a lot of water; we use a lot of resources. And one of the things we want to do as a company is lower our carbon footprint.

We're looking to recapture the CO2 off of our fermentations. But what we don't know right now is when it's best to recapture that CO2, when that CO2 is most pure and most economical for us to reuse, and also how that CO2 can then be repurposed in our brewery. How many times we can we recapture that same CO2?

How we do that most economically, feasibly, and in such a repeatable and reliable way is something that we're looking for AI to help us with.

PAYAM MOUSAVI: Blindman came to Amii through the REMI Program with the goal of understanding more about AI and ML and leveraging its power to reduce their carbon footprint.

We helped them get a better understanding of the potential of AI and ML and what it could actually do for their brewery. Now, they hopefully have the knowledge to drive ML projects towards the goal of carbon neutrality.

SHANE: The relationship with Amii and the use of AI in our in our brewery is going to allow us to not only test the limits of what it means to be a craft brewer but also look to solve other problems. Yes, we're looking at the CO2 problem right now, but perhaps there's other uses for AI, other ways to collaborate, especially with Amii being here in Alberta, and look at what that can be applied to in craft beer settings.

PAYAM: Amii is about to have our first AI Week in Edmonton. We were trying to do something fun, so we chatted with Blindman Brewery, and we decided that what better way to have some fun, and at the same time demonstrate the power of AI, than to generate these beer labels for their May Long Double IPA.

SHANE: This is definitely a craft beer drinker's beer. We use hops in a way in this beer to express big, bold tropical and fruit flavours, rather than express a bitterness, and we back that up with an equal amount of malt flavour and kind of a silky mouthfeel.

PAYAM: We used a technique called neural style transfer that leverages the power of deep neural networks. And the way it works is you take a style image and a content image and blend them together using these neural networks. They take different proportions of the style versus the Amii logo, and the graphic designer was the final judge to decide which blends work better.

As with many other industries, we get the best results when the humans work with the AI to come up with the final product.

SHANE: You'll be able to find this beer at craft beer focused stores across Alberta and probably at all the events during AI Week.

Congratulations, Amii, from all of us here at Blindman Brewing on 20 years of AI excellence!