We kept running into the same problem.
When we started exploring AI for distilling, we heard from distillers who had made wrong assumptions after conversations with general AI tools. The answers sounded confident. The reasoning didn’t always hold up.
Honestly, it made sense. A lot of distilling knowledge still passes from one person to the next, offline. And an awful lot of what does make it onto the internet repeats the same old assumptions. The modern principles we’ve spent the past decade and a half developing, testing and teaching were often missing.
That bothered us. We’ve shared a ridiculous amount of knowledge over the years. Through Odin’s writing, courses, experiments, recipe development and thousands of conversations with distillers. Surely we could make it easier to find—and easier to understand.
First, we opened the classroom.
Education has always been a big part of how we move the distilling industry forward. So step one was making the full iStill University course available online, for free.
Done. You can work through the lessons at your own pace, from fermentation and yeast to cuts, flavor and still design.
But learning rarely follows a perfectly straight line. You read something, it raises a question, and suddenly you want to understand how it connects to the spirit you’re making. That was the next thing we wanted to solve.
So we built DistillingAI.
DistillingAI brings our teaching into a conversation. Ask a question in your own words. Ask it to explain something differently. Follow an idea until it starts to click.
It draws on iStill University, selected articles we’ve reviewed, and current information about our equipment. We’re careful about what goes into it. A useful explanation from an older article can still teach you something; an old equipment specification can send you in completely the wrong direction.
The idea behind it is very much Odin’s: good distilling is controlled cause and effect. What did you change? What happened as a result? Can you make it happen again? Understanding that is a lot more useful than memorizing someone else’s recipe.
The ambition is to make that teaching available whenever a question comes up. Twenty-four hours a day. No coffee required.
Ask it something you actually want to know.
Why do we build our stills from stainless steel? How do yeast choice and fermentation temperature affect flavor? What are you really choosing when you make your cuts?
If you’re new to distilling, ask it to slow down and explain the basics. If you’ve been at it for years, challenge an assumption or work through a different approach. Tell it what you’re making and what you want to understand. The conversation gets more useful when it has something real to work with.
It’s also there while you work through University. Ask about a lesson, explore the reasoning, then go back to the course with a clearer idea of what you’re looking at.
You’ll find it right here on the site.
Look for the colored iStill symbol in the bottom-right corner. Open it from whatever page you’re on and start talking to DistillingAI. You can follow its lesson links around the site and keep the conversation open.
Sources below an answer show where its explanation comes from. “Continue learning” links suggest something useful to read next. And if you’re exploring equipment, you can ask it to put together a setup, then open that draft in Design Studio to review the machines, options and pricing yourself.
Want to speak to us? Switch to the iStill team tab. That’s a separate conversation with our actual team. When someone is available, we can talk there live. Otherwise, leave a message and our reply will appear in the chat when we’re back.
Try it. Tell us where it falls short.
It’s free to use. It’s also still being improved. Ask something simple. Ask something difficult. Ask a weird question. If an answer feels off, question it and check the sources. We want to hear about it.
A quick note on support: if your equipment has a fault or needs repair or calibration, please go straight to our equipment support team. We keep that work with our team, rather than asking an AI to diagnose your machine.
We’ve always believed that better understanding makes better distillers. This is another way to put that knowledge in your hands. We’d love for you to try it.
Anyway, welcome to the future, I guess.