I Built An AI To Price A Beer I Refuse To Pour

We don’t serve Spotted Cow at Garth’s Brew Bar. Never have. It’s a fine beer and half of Wisconsin grew up on it, but our whole thing is the beer you haven’t met yet, so New Glarus’s flagship has never touched our lines.

Which is exactly why, across a few Saturday nights, I had a robot call 96 bars across the state to find out what everyone else charges for it.

I’d read about a guy in Ireland who used an AI voice to call three thousand pubs and track the price of Guinness. It went viral, and pubs actually started lowering their prices to look good on his board. I wanted the Wisconsin version. So over a weekend and about eight dollars, I wired up an AI agent that could dial a bar, introduce itself honestly (“quick heads up, I’m an AI, and I’m not selling anything”), ask what a pint of Spotted Cow runs, and then ask the question I actually cared about: if you had to send a Spotted Cow drinker to one other beer, what would you pour them?

Then I pointed it at New Glarus, Madison, Milwaukee, the Dells, Minocqua, and Green Bay, and let it go for the pilot.

Here’s what I expected: a tidy map, cheapest pint to priciest, across the whole state.

Here’s what I got: 96 calls, and 5 prices.

It turns out people do not want to tell a robot the price of a beer. Most of the calls hit voicemail, a supper-club phone tree (“dial one for the front desk”), or a bartender who picked up, heard a synthetic voice, and hung up before the second sentence. On a Saturday night, with the place slammed, I honestly don’t blame them. The clean statewide price index I set out to build does not exist, because the premise was wrong. You cannot cold-call your way to that number. People will give it to a person, not to a machine.

But the handful of bars that did talk handed me two things I wasn’t looking for.

The first was the Dells. Four of my five prices came from Wisconsin Dells supper clubs, and they were the priciest in the state. The Del-Bar quoted eight dollars a pint. Fur, Fin & Feather, five. So the tourist corridor is both the only place that reliably answers the phone and the place that charges the most for the same beer. That’s not an index. That’s a tourist tax, and now I’ve got the receipts.

The second one is the one I’m keeping. What they said to drink instead. Kleeman’s in New Glarus said Totally Naked. A Madison tavern said Moon Man. And The Del-Bar, a white-tablecloth supper club charging eight bucks a pint, told my robot to pour a Spotted Cow drinker a Miller High Life. I’ve been doing this a long time, and that might be the most honest beer recommendation I have ever heard.

A few things I’m taking from the whole exercise, in case you’re thinking about turning an AI loose on an idea of your own.

The cheapest experiment is the one reality can kill in a weekend. I was out eight dollars and a few Saturdays, not a month and a real budget. If the hypothesis is wrong, you want to find that out for the price of a sandwich.

Also, your hypothesis is almost never the story. I set out to rank prices. The leftovers, the tourist tax and the “try this instead” map, turned out to be far more interesting than the thing I was chasing. Build the experiment loose enough that its byproducts can surprise you.

And people talk to people. AI made it absurdly cheap to ask a dumb question 96 times in one night. The answer it kept getting back was that trust doesn’t scale the way phone calls do. Worth sitting with before you point a robot at your own customers.

Alas. I’m scrapping the price index and building the thing the data actually wanted to be: a map of what Wisconsin bartenders tell you to drink when you’ve had your fill of Spotted Cow. Which, it turns out, is the beer education I’ve been trying to do for years. I just needed a robot and a bad idea to find it.

Stay Positive & Grab A High Life, I Guess