I asked ChatGPT to write me a homebrew recipe

Many of you may have heard of ChatGPT. Over the past few weeks and months, its been all over news articles on the web.  If you’ve not heard of it before, it is a chatbot that you can ask questions and it will respond with articulate answers across many domains of knowledge.

I wanted to test it out and what better way than to do so than with a homebrew recipe! I asked it to produce a recipe for a 25 liter Hazy Pale Ale and this is what it came up with.

Ingredients

• 19 liters of water
• 3.6 kg of pale malt
• 0.9 kg of wheat malt
• 0.45 kg of oats malt
• 60 g of Mosaic hops (60 minutes)
• 30 g of Mosaic hops (15 minutes)
• 30 g of Citra hops (0 minutes)
• 10 g of Citra hops (dry hop for 3 days)
• 1 sachet of American Ale yeast (Wyeast 1056 or Safale US-05)

Timings

• Mash at 67°C for 60 minutes
• Boil for 60 minutes
• Ferment for 7 to 10 days at 20°C
• Dry hop for 3 days
• Condition for at least 7 days before carbonating and bottling or kegging

Instructions

1. Heat 19 liters of water to 67°C in your brew kettle.
2. Add the grains (pale malt, wheat malt, and oats malt) and stir thoroughly.
3. Hold the mash temperature at 67°C for 60 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Sparge with hot water (75-78°C) to collect the sweet wort in your boil kettle.
5. Boil the wort for 60 minutes, adding hops as indicated in the ingredient list.
6. Chill the wort to 20°C as quickly as possible and transfer it to a fermenter.
7. Aerate the wort and pitch the yeast.
8. Ferment at 20°C for 7 to 10 days, until the specific gravity reaches 1.014 or less.
9. Add the dry hops to the fermenter and let it sit for 3 days.
10. Transfer the beer to a conditioning tank, add priming sugar if bottling, and let it condition for at least 7 days.
11. Carbonate and bottle or keg the beer. Enjoy!

Note: This recipe is just a guideline and can be adjusted to suit your personal taste or equipment. You can also use different hops or yeast strains to experiment with different flavors.

Summary

I have to be honest, I am super impressed. Given that ChatGPT is using only AI, the instructions are pretty detailed. It also includes a Citra and Mosaic combination that a lot of commercial hazy beers use these days. The ChatGPT result doesn’t include the gravity calculations and final ABV, but given the parameters that I asked it for, I think it did a pretty good job.

If I had to find fault though, I would say that the hop quantities aren’t quite right. 60 grams of Mosaic hops for a 60 min boil is too high – the IBUs come in at 156! I’d also say that 10 grams of Citra at dry hop is too low for this style. I’d love to attempt to brew this recipe, but I think it would need some tweaks first.

For those that are interested, I added this ChatGPT homebrew recipe to Brewfather and it is available to download here if you’d like to see the finer details.