Mixing Beer with AI

Every year the American Homebrewers Association has a Big Brew Event where they encourage Home Brewers across the country to spend the first Saturday in May making one of their own recipes. I have participated in this for several years at Jay’s Brewing shop in Manassas, where Jay’s also partners with Downright Obsessed Homebrewers (DOH) to host a competition for local homebrewers, with qualified beer experts as judges, and brewing-related prizes. 

Since the first Saturday of May this year happened to be May 4th, the recipes had to have a Star Wars theme. The options were Degobah Dunkel, Jabba Juice Hazy IPA, and Return of the Jedi Pale Ale.

Personally, I opt to simplify and speed up the brewing process by using Mr. Beer pre-hopped extracts as the base for my beers, which allows it to go into the fermenter within 60-90 minutes, versus the 4-5 hours it takes when brewing all grain. Mr. Beer’s Little Brown Keg fermenter simplifies the process, too, using just one container for fermenting and bottling directly from the keg into PET reusable bottles.

the Hopped Extract can and fermenter together with the labeled bottles.

Mr. Beer offers a variety of hopped extracts and recipes for different types of beers, but what it doesn’t offer is a recipe for Jabba Juice IPA. To synthesize a beer to the same specifications as Jabba Juice IPA, I had to use an online calculator and recipe builder from Brewer’s Friend, started with a Hopped Extract, and varied the ingredients until it matched. In keeping with the event theme, the recipe used hops called Comet, Galaxy and Eclipse. I used Verdant Ale yeast.

The Second in Class win came with yeast packets as a prize!

I’ve entered my brews into the competition before and never won anything, but this time was different! To my surprise, my Belgian Blond Ale scored Second in Class! 

I wanted to bottle a complete 6-pack of this Jabba Juice brew, which led me to needing a good label. I envisioned a label featuring Jabba the Hut, with text denoting my beer and details, but there’s no way I can draw that. So I turned to AI.

My first attempt was with openart.ai; it kept insisting on drawing Jabba with hind legs, even when specifically prompted with “no rear legs”. After awhile, I gave up and tried CoPilot, powered by DALLE-3.

Sequence of pictures made in openart.ai by refining the prompt, from left to right.

CoPilot worked a lot better for this project. It still wanted to add legs, but the other images were pretty good and the beer was clearly labeled.

This set was generated from the simple prompt “Jabba the Hutt drinking Nicks Jabba Juice IPA beer”.

I incrementally asked it in the chat “Add a star field backing” and got this nice set.

CoPilot even suggested adding spaceships, but it has it's mix-ups. It put the Enterprise behind Jabba! Another quirk is that the AI images don't seem to understand text, so they can misspell or mess it up in various ways. Overall, though, it was nice that it offered features such as incremental and suggestions, and in the end I got something that worked!

Once I had an image that I liked, I added the frame and additional details using PowerPoint. Then I copied the slide to an image format and used the Avery label maker in Word to create a set of six labels to print and stick on the bottles.

As for the beer, it's pretty good!

And if you look closely, you'll see the glass has been engraved. Even that was a custom creation! It was done using the rotary feature on the Nova Labs Laser Cutter.

Cheers!