For most of my adult life I've been rather passionate about beer. It might have something to do with the fact my father used to work at a brewery, so there's almost certainly tinge of nostalgia behind it, but honestly, I think it's more to do with the memories - or lack thereof - that I associate with this most misunderstood of beverages. These memories, and the emotions they evoke, of friends and family alike sharing stories, scars and salutations, have been key components of every beer related ad campaign for decades of course, but nobody has ever actually attempted to brew a beer that encapsulated the emotions associated with a good knees-up. Until now.
“We used data and technology to interpret something abstract and turn it into an experience”
Havas helia has been working with IBM Watson to capture the mood of a New Year party by creating first beer actually that tastes of joy and optimism. These might sound like pie-in-the-sky ideas, but by utilising the IBM Watson system, the customer engagement agency has been able to analyse thousands of New Year related messages on social media and match them with a range of emotional states, states it worked with the system to replicate with its recipe. How does that work exactly? Well to understand that you'd have to understand Watson, and to be completely honest, even after a boat load of research I'm not yet 100% sure exactly how Watson works, but I can at least appreciate what it's trying to do.
Essentially, IBM Watson is an immensely powerful technology platform that analyses language to produce personality profiles from large amounts of unstructured data, and by using it, data experts from Havas helia were able to gain insights into exactly what would make the perfect, emotional beer. Havas helia were also able to categorise ingredients according to different human characteristics, such as assertive, friendly or intelligent. The next step to the path of perfect beer nirvana was for Watson to analyse 2,800 different beer recipes whilst feeding the computer descriptions of the ingredients, recipes, tasting notes and beer reviews to identify the perfect recipe. The top ten beers that matched each of the most shared New Year emotions on social media, such as joy, harmony and so on, were then identified and, through further analysis, all of these beer recipes were then combined to find the most common ingredients.
“What could be better than a beer that lets you drink in the optimism of the New Year?”
Emerging as the top three most common ingredients were honey, the Nelson Sauvin hop variety and the Hallertauer hop. Each of these was used to create the data-powered New Year beer 0101. Honey denotes love and cheerfulness, Nelson Sauvin is for optimism, imagination and resolution, and Hallertauer is for excitement and emotion. The beer was brewed in partnership with independent microbrewery, High Peak Brew Co, which is based in the Peak District. Havas helia chose to work with High Peak Brew because the company’s brews are unrefined and unfiltered, enabling the brewery to get an exact taste that would match the data as closely as possible.
IBM Watson in the flesh (as it were)
Steven Bennett-Day, Executive Creative Director, Havas helia, said: “We wanted to use data and technology to interpret something abstract such as positive feelings and emotions and turn it into an experience. We thought; what could be better than a beer that lets you drink in the optimism of the New Year?” It all sounds pretty cool of course, but it feels like so much more than just a cool way of showing off this new snazzy bit of IBM technology though. In fact, for me, the 0101 beer underlines what a powerful tool social media can be when used in the right way. I'll leave my final judgements until I can sample the beer itself though. To that end; if anyone at Havas helia is reading this and would appreciate a follow up article, if you fancy sending a few bottles my way I would certainly consider it. Wink wink.
Benjamin Hiorns is a freelance writer, musician and self-appointed beer aficionado from Kidderminster in the UK.
