Is Your Brewer Cheating on You?
Purity, judgment, and the myth of tradition
I’ve run a craft brewery since 2014. Long enough to know that tradition is mostly a story we tell after the fact.
This is the third essay in a series about judgment and substitution. It uses brewing to look at a wider question: what happens when we stop paying attention and hand off responsibility.
What Are We Protecting?
Is that cheating? Are you really a craft brewer? Will the craft police raid your brewery to strip you of your mash paddle and revoke your beard privileges?
A brewer asks if you use ChatGPT for recipes.
The question is not really about software. It is about trust.
The implication is familiar. If a machine helped, something human was replaced. Something sacred was violated. The beer is less honest. The brewer is less authentic.
But before answering that, we should ask a better question.
What exactly are we trying to protect?
Purity
Before hops, brewers used gruit. Blends of herbs, roots, and whatever else seemed to work. The mix varied by region and season. Some of it was harmless. Some of it was not.
One documented ingredient in some regions was black henbane. A nightshade. Hallucinogenic in small doses. Toxic in larger ones. It caused dry mouth, which made drinkers thirstier, which made them drink more, which pushed some of them into the danger zone.
That was not tradition. That was chemistry without understanding.
Fast forward to Québec in the 1960s. Dow Brewery added cobalt sulfate to improve foam stability. It worked. It also killed around fifty people.
At some point, someone should have paid attention to what we now call the Reinheitsgebot, often translated as the German purity law.
But even that story is not what we pretend it is.
It was not about romance. It was not about soul. It was an economic and safety regulation, established in 1516, designed to control inputs, protect grain supplies and bread prices, and avoid poisoning people. It restricted beer to barley, water, and hops. Yeast was not excluded. It simply had not been identified yet.
For centuries, it was not even described as a “purity law.” That framing only emerged in the early 20th century, when the regulation was retroactively branded as a symbol of quality and tradition.
We retrofitted the romance later.
This obsession with purity was distinctly German. Belgian brewers took a different path. They worked with what they had: leftover grains at the end of winter, local fruits, spices, and later sugar. Sugar was often added deliberately to raise alcohol without overloading the beer and, in some periods, to work around malt-based taxation, which was tied to grain use rather than final strength.
Not rebellion. Adaptation.
Brewers love a good story. Especially the one you tell between sips in the taproom. But tradition did not descend from the heavens intact. It was edited, enforced, revised, and eventually marketed.
This matters, because when people invoke purity, they usually are not talking about history. They are talking about the moment they personally stopped feeling comfortable with change.
The Line You Drew
If tradition is constructed, what are we really protecting when we reject new tools?
Gas-fired vapour-barrier kettles. Glycol chillers. Laboratory yeast. Water chemistry adjustments. Cryo hops. Centrifuges. Automated carbonation systems.
None of these existed in 1516.
Is it authentic to brew a stout in a place where the water has none of the mineral profile of Dublin? Of course not.
But it can be deeply authentic to the style of a dry Irish stout.
We manipulate the water precisely so the beer behaves the way the style demands.
The line between acceptable and unacceptable technology is rarely principled. It usually sits exactly where the speaker got comfortable.
Everything before that point is tradition. Everything after it is cheating.
The Wedding
On a recent trip to Cameroon, a local collaborator asked me a question.
“So your recipes, you must protect them so no one can replicate them?”
Not really.
We focus on clean tanks, the best ingredients we can get, and a motivated brewer who knows their system. After that, replication is not the risk people think it is.
Craft is not defined by secrecy. It never has been at its best.
It is defined by three things:
Real ingredients. Engaged technique. Human supervision.
Craft allows borrowing. It allows iteration. It allows improvement.
Tradition works a lot like a wedding. The vows matter. The commitment matters. But no one pretends the relationship should freeze at the ceremony. Craft is not about preserving the moment you said “I do.” It is about what you build after.
Something new is great. Something borrowed from another brewery is inevitable. Something blue, to turn the beer blue, probably not.
What craft does not allow is abdication.
Four Camps
When new tools appear, brewers tend to fall into one of four camps.
Purists Clean tanks. Clean beer. Everything else is noise. We ferment sugar. We do not serve it. If it needs glitter, the beer failed.
Experimenters Curious. Iterative. Willing to try. Prepared, when necessary, to dump a batch.
Undercover users Quietly using new tools and techniques while publicly criticizing them.
Unaware brewers Do not know what they do not know. Focused on output, with only a partial understanding of the inputs. Rare, but they surface when the system behaves outside its normal assumptions.
By default, in a living craft, we should all be experimenters.
Imagine if beer had stopped at its first iteration. Most early beers were not the result of choice, but of environment. Local water. Available grains. Wild yeast they did not even know existed.
Yeast was not identified as the driver of fermentation until the mid-19th century. Before that, brewers worked by observation, not explanation.
The purists are not wrong to care. They are wrong to freeze there.
The craft evolved because curiosity outpaced comfort.
The Solenoid
ChatGPT can generate a recipe for a Belgian Tripel in seconds.
It cannot tell me if my yeast is stressed because I underpitched. It cannot tell me if my thermometer or flow meter is drifting. It cannot tell me if fermentation is throwing heat instead of character. It cannot tell me if the right move today is patience, intervention, or dumping the tank.
The craft is not following the recipe. The craft is knowing when to ignore it.
We have a PLC that controls fermentation temperature. It opens a solenoid to circulate cooled glycol whenever the beer drifts out of its target range. It is precise. There is an alarm if the temperature stays out of range for more than a few minutes. But the system is designed to cool, not warm. There is no reason for it to do the opposite in normal operation.
One Saturday, I stopped by the brewery and, out of habit, checked the fermentation temperatures. Not because an alarm went off. Just a reflex. A solenoid had stuck open. Glycol was still flowing. The temperature was dropping. Fermentation was slowing fast. The system thought everything was fine. The recipe was correct. The dashboard was calm.
If no one had physically checked the tank, that batch would have stalled and died quietly.
We caught it in time. Not because the system knew. Because someone did.
AI can surface patterns. It can summarize known techniques. It can remind you of things you already forgot.
It cannot taste. It cannot smell. It cannot notice that something feels off.
And it certainly cannot take responsibility for the outcome.
The Gap
This is not AI versus no AI.
It is expertise versus unexamined execution.
Give the same recipe to two brewers in the same place. One may see a starting point. The other may see an answer.
Information scales instantly. Experience compounds slowly.
The deeper problem is not bad answers. It is unasked questions.
You do not Google a problem you do not know exists. You do not prompt ChatGPT about underpitching if you have always used the same amount of yeast and never realized the cell count had changed.
Experience does not just answer questions. It reveals which questions matter.
That gap is where craft lives.
A recipe can tell you how to brew a beer.
Only time in the brewery tells you whether you have learned anything.
If a brewer outsources judgment, they stop practicing the craft.
But if your brewer is trying to make better beer, willing to do the research, to test different approaches, and to understand the parameters they are working within, then you have a great brewer.
Tools do not erase craft. Abdication does.