Researchers in Leuven have managed to objectively improve Belgian beers by using artificial intelligence to analyse more than two hundred chemical components, according to Nature Communications.

It takes courage to tinker with Belgian beer. Belgian beer culture is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Belgian brewers are proud of their products. But a team from VIB-KU Leuven has embarked on a major project to determine, in a scientific, chemical way, what could make beer better.

‘We definitely noticed some reluctance at Belgian brewers’ conferences when we talked about our project’, says head researcher Kevin Verstrepen, professor at KU Leuven and director of the VIB-KU Leuven Centre for Microbiology. Comments such as “our beers are already good”, “we don’t want AI-generated uniformity” or “we want to brew, it’s a craft!” were all too common. But it was never our goal to define what the perfect beer should be.’