11. Today’s customer has a wide variety of options regarding what he or she drinks. A drinker’s choice depends on various factors, including mood, venue, and occasion. Coors’ goal is to ensure that the customer chooses a Coors brand no matter what the circumstances are.

According to Coors, creativity is the key to long-term success. To be the customer’s choice brand, Coors needs to be creative and anticipate the customer’s ever so rapidly changing moods. An important issue with beers is the flavor; each beer has a distinctive flavor. These flavors are mostly determined through panel tests. However, such tests take time. If Coors could understand the beer flavor based solely on its chemical composition, it would open up new avenues to create beer that would suit customer expectations.

The relationship between chemical analysis and beer flavor is not clearly understood yet. Substantial data exist on the chemical composition of a beer and sensory analysis. Coors needed a mechanism to link those two together. Neural networks were applied to create the link between chemical composition and sensory analysis.