Inside Dewar's cavernous whisky warehouses, man's best mechanical friend--a Boston Dynamics robot dog with an ethanol sensor for a nose--is on the hunt for leaky barrels. Wooden barrels are what make the magic happen in your favorite bottle of whisky . At Bacardi Limited, the world's largest privately held spirits company, barrel leakage is a massive headache. Consider the company's Dewar's blended Scotch whisky brand (just one of the dozens it owns). Most of the time, Dewar's will have over 100 warehouses full of aging barrels of whisky, 25,000 casks in each one.

Stirling Distillery has two years to figure it out. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Scotland's smallest whisky distillery also hopes to be one of the most innovative in time for its first batch's debut. But with only around two years until Sterling Distillery's inaugural liquor matures, it remains to be seen if the company can ditch traditional glass bottles for a material associated more with cheap beer than fine whisky--aluminum. Any serious distillery uses glass bottles for the good stuff.

Artificial intelligence can tell Scotch whisky from American whiskey and identify its strongest constituent aromas more reliably than human experts – by using data rather than tasting the drinks. Andreas Grasskamp at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Germany and his colleagues trained an AI molecular odour prediction algorithm called OWSum on descriptions of different whiskies. Then, in a study involving 16 samples – nine types of Scotch whisky and seven types of American bourbon or whiskey – they tasked OWSum with telling drinks from the two nations apart based on keyword descriptions of their flavours, such as flowery, fruity, woody or smoky. Using these alone, the AI could tell which country a drink came from with almost 94 per cent accuracy. Because the complex aroma of these spirits is determined by the absence or presence of many chemical compounds, the researchers also fed the AI a reference dataset of 390 molecules commonly found in whiskies.

They arguably have one of the best occupations in the world. But whisky sommeliers may soon have some competition for their jobs – from AI. Scientists have devised machine learning algorithms that can determine whether a whisky is of American or Scotch origin and identify its strongest aromas. And they even outperform human experts, the results show. A whisky's aroma is determined by a complex mixture of odorous compounds, which makes it highly challenging to assess. Panels of human experts are often used to identify the strongest notes of a whisky but these require a significant investment in time, money and training – and agreement between experts is often rare.

Researchers have used the technology to predict the notes that waft off whisky and determine whether a dram was made in the US or Scotland. The work is a step towards automated systems that can predict the complex aroma of whisky from its molecular makeup. Expert panels usually assess woody, smoky, buttery or caramel aromas, which can help to ensure they don't vary substantially between batches of the same product. "The beautiful thing about the AI is that it is very consistent," said Dr Andreas Grasskamp, who led the research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging in Freising, Germany. "You have this subjectivity still in trained experts. We are not replacing the human nose with this, but we are really supporting it through efficiency and consistency."

Ewan Morgan, National Luxury Ambassador and Head of Whisky Outreach at Diageo North America, told Fox News Digital how SmokeDNAi technology is being used to understand the aging process of whisky. For two years, Diageo analyzed various Scotch whiskies using AI and algorithms. Diageo, an alcohol beverage company, invested 230 million into a portfolio of whisky tourism projects. Of this lump sum, more than 44 million was dedicated to the exploration of whisky maturation using technology called SmokeDNAi. Using SmokeDNAi, teams tested and analyzed the flavor profiles and mouthfeel of non-identical twin whiskies distilled in different casks – one remnant and one original.

There is a lot of fear about AI - but it might do wonders for our taste buds. Around the world, major companies such as Mars are scrambling to use artificial intelligence to design better foods, with dozens of products already on sale. From sodas to alcohol and vegan food, firms want hope that AI's vast processing power will help invent recipes that we mere mortals have overlooked. Analyst Mordor Intelligence expects the market for AI in food production to grow to $35 billion worldwide by 2028. The limited edition Y3000 drink boasts that it is'futuristic flavoured' (Coca Cola) Coca Cola has released a new Zero Sugar drink'co-created' by human designers and AI which is designed to taste like a drink from the year 3000.

Reliable identification of high-value products such as whisky is an increasingly important area, as issues such as brand substitution (i.e. fraudulent products) and quality control are critical to the industry. We have examined a range of machine learning algorithms and interfaced them directly with a portable Raman spectroscopy device to both identify and characterize the ethanol/methanol concentrations of commercial whisky samples. We demonstrate that machine learning models can achieve over 99% accuracy in brand identification across twenty-eight commercial samples. To demonstrate the flexibility of this approach we utilised the same samples and algorithms to quantify ethanol concentrations, as well as measuring methanol levels in spiked whisky samples. Our machine learning techniques are then combined with a through-the-bottle method to perform spectral analysis and identification without requiring the sample to be decanted from the original container, showing the practical potential of this approach to the detection of counterfeit or adulterated spirits and other high value liquid samples.

While whisky is one of the most popular tipples around the world, most drinkers still rely on the label to distinguish between cheap and expensive bottles. Now, scientists have developed a robotic nose called NOS.E that can distinguish between different brands, origins and styles by'sniffing' the liquor. During testing, NOS.E reached 100 per cent accuracy for detecting the region, 96.15 per cent accuracy for brand name and 92.31 per cent accuracy for style. The team hopes the bot could be used across a wide range of beverages in the future, including wine and cognac, as well as whisky. Scientists have developed a robotic nose called NOS.E that can distinguish between different brands, origins and styles of whisky by'sniffing' the liquor NOS.E is designed to mimic the human olfactory system and uses eight gas sensors to detect odours in a vial of whisky.

It may have been created with the help of AI. Mackmyra, an award-winning Swedish distillery, has launched Intelligens, the world's first whisky created using an artificial intelligence program. Mackmyra partnered with Finnish technology company Fourkind to develop an AI system that augments and automates some of the tasks of the distillery's master blender, who is responsible for whisky flavor and product development. Master blenders spend their time meticulously tasting and experimenting to create the best flavors possible, and that process can be time-consuming. Mackmyra wanted machine learning to work its magic in sifting through massive amounts of data to find new combinations.