Everyone in the distilling industry keeps hearing “AI”, “machine learning” and “generative AI” — usually from someone trying to sell something. This 5-part series gives you a straight, working definition of each, in plain language, with distillery examples and no sales deck. The aim isn’t to impress you with the technology; it’s to make you fluent enough to ask the one question that matters: which of these do you actually mean, and does my problem even need it?
No hype, as always. Where these tools earn their place in a distillery, I’ll show you. Where they confidently lie, I’ll show you that too.
The series
- What Is AI, Really? A Distiller’s Plain-Language Guide — why “AI” is an umbrella over three different tools, and the one question that cuts through the hype.
- What Is Machine Learning? Pattern-Finding for the Distillery — learning a pattern from your own records instead of writing a rule, and why a model is only ever a mirror of its data.
- What Is Generative AI? The Difference That Matters for Distillers — the chatbot kind: brilliant at words, unreliable at numbers, and why grounding fixes most of it.
- AI vs Machine Learning vs Generative AI: Which Is Which in the Distillery — a decision test that routes any distillery problem to the right tool by the shape of the answer.
- Where a Distillery Actually Starts with AI — not with a tool, but with one measured record — and the order of operations that makes all three pay off.
Read them in order — each builds on the last. Every post in the series is tagged #distilling-ai-foundations.
When you’re ready to go deeper into the spirits side, the full Distilling & Maturation track covers cut points, the angel’s share, cask selection, blending and bottling maturity — the practical AI work that builds on these foundations.