(Charlottesville, VA) – Champion Brewing Company has collaborated with Metis Machine to develop the first-ever beer brewed using data science and machine learning. The beer, dubbed ML IPA (for Machine Learning) will debut at the TomTom Founders’ Festival block parties April 13-16, 2018.

“We provided the parameters on which IPAs are judged at the Great American Beer Festival (SRM, ABV, IBU) and matched that range with the 10-best-selling IPAs nationally, as well as the 10 worst selling IPAs at a local retailer and Metis came up with the results,” said Hunter Smith, owner of Champion Brewing Company. “We are stoked to be the first to use this method of creating a beer recipe.”

“Our goal was to demonstrate that artificial intelligence, while perceived to be quite daunting, can lend itself to many practical domains, including craft brewing,” said Tyler Hutcherson, data science engineer at Metis Machine. “However, there’s no way an algorithm will ever be able to replace the hard work and creativity required to make a quality beer. We’re thankful for Champion and their partnership; without their resourcefulness, our model would have just produced a bunch of pointless numbers. Artificial intelligence at its best combines statistical learning with domain expertise to produce something actionable.”

The results of the endeavor are an IPA with 6% alcohol by volume (ABV), 60 IBU, a measurement on the international bitterness scale, and 6 SRM, or standard reference method which is a color system used to indicate the color of the malt and finished beer.

IPA fans can be the first to try the beer this weekend at Champion’s Tap Room at 324 Sixth Street SE in Charlottesville or at TomTom Founders’ Festival events.

Champion Brewing Company is a Charlottesville-based craft brewery with a three-barrel Tap Room and the “Missile Factory,” a 30-barrel production facility recently expanded to 15,000 barrels of capacity. Champion opened a second Tap Room in Richmond, Virginia in 2016 and Brasserie Saison, a restaurant and brewery on the downtown mall in Charlottesville, in February, 2017.

Metis Machine LLC, based in Charlottesville, Va., elevates an organization’s data science workflow from proof-to-concept to Enterprise-class production by automating deployment, orchestrating delivery of machine learning and deep learning. Metis Machine’s platform called Skafos is the world’s first ML-continuous deployment and monitoring platform built exclusively for delivering AI to Enterprise-scale production through tooling and workflows familiar to the people already tasked with keeping the trains running.