Brewing Beer With Free Software 83
An anonymous reader tipped us to an interview with Phillip Lee, author of Brewtarget, one of the best pieces of Free brewing software available (it's even in Debian). The interview discusses some of the technical decisions made (why Qt and Cmake?), and mentions a bit of the plans for future development: "The way the database was designed previously really hadn't been changed since the my first code in 2008, and we were running into a brick wall with some of the features we wanted. After we move to SQLite, there will be quite a lot of new features like being able to search through the ingredients in the database and stuff like that. I also plan to add some water chemistry tools for people that like to alter the ions and salts to fit a particular profile." (The last bit about water salt modifications comes as a relief to at least this brewer.)
The original Free as in Beer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The original Free as in Beer (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of the day-to-day calculations we use in our craft brewery are simple Perl scripts run on FreeBSD. Who needs more? The real work is done with a pencil and a calculator anyway! ;-)
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I use beersmith too and am very happy. Plus, it's really not expensive - if it saves me from making a mistake on a single brew it has paid for itself.
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Most of my real work with beer is done with my liver.
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That said, my scales broke before the last brew I did. I had to guess at all the quantities - also I didn't have my standardised grist hopper (B&Q bucket) so my estimates were a bit off. The beer turned out at 1.074OG! Oops.
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Never mind, you can just have a chaser with it.
Free Beer (Score:5, Interesting)
On a related note: this might be more of an Ask Slashdot topic than a comment, but has anyone on here tried Free Beer [wikipedia.org]?
If so, was it any good?
Re:Free Beer (Score:5, Informative)
Version 1.0 looks like a terrible recipe, to put it mildly. It's got insane amount of sugar for such a light beer. Then again, the project seems to have started out from the idea of applying open source ideals to beer recipes, disregarding the fact that there already were thousands and thousands of recipes shared freely in the homebrew community, on various messageboards now and on usenet and mailing lists before that. From 2.0 and up, it might be good, although I have no idea what the guarana berries are good for.
At any rate, the project is nothing new and nothing special. There are plenty of better resources for brewing good beer, by more knowledgeable brewers. I suggest homebrewtalk.com and forum.northernbrewer.com, along with howtobrew.com as a great introduction. As recipes aren't copyrightable, the creative commons license is a bit nonsensical for this.
Water utilization? (Score:5, Interesting)
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ProMash does a great job with this. By far the best brewing software I've used.
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It works pretty well under Wine, too. I've looked at some of the alternatives, but I'd need a way to import at least the recipes that I've accumulated in ProMash.
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It's called a sightglass.
Or, you should know how much water you need overall for your system. For a 5 gallon batch I know that I need 9.2 gallons of water overall to put 7 gallons in the boil kerttle. After a 90 min boil this will leave me with 5.5 gallons into the fermenter, allowing a half gallon for trub loss.
Hop absorpotion varies (Score:2)
Re:Water utilization? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to say but that's just not correct. You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected, and to do so, you need to look at how much water you are boiling off over a period of time. There are a lot of other factors with regard to this as well. Your altitude will cause you to have differing levels of boil off as well. Ever seen a recipe with high altitude variations for preparation? It's the same principle. If you want five gallons of beer, you need to know about how much water you will loose per hour at a given boil rate. This goes for both all grain and extract methods. All grain makes it even more important to know about water consuption for reasons not to do with boil off.
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This is all true, but boil-off rates will vary from brewer to brewer, even if they're next-door neighbors with similar equipment. A brewer who uses a slightly wider brew pot and a really aggressive boil will lose more water per hour to boil off than someone with a narrow pot and a gentle boil. I find it hard to imagine any software predicting this reliably, it's something you just need to measure for yourself.
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BeerSmith let's you set a boil-off rate, but it's represented as a percentage. That's not how boil-off works. If you have a 10 gallong batch or a 5 gallon batch at the same vigor of boil in the same conditions, they'll each boil off the same amount of water. So I have to manually adjust that for my 10 gallon batches or I end up off on final volume.
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Yeah, I've seen this in some (and heard of it in many others). It's a very odd design choice, as it's flatly incorrect, but I think it reflects home brewing's "folk engineering" roots. Equations for various calculations get passed around by people who have the know-how to apply them but either lack the background or inclination to find and correct basic errors like this. (I do seem to recall hearing of at least one software package that switched this to a volume-per-hour input, but I don't recall which.)
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It's of order 0.5-1 gallon per hour for a typical setup.
If you are brewing carefully and precisely, it is significant enough that you need to account for it because it will affect your hops utilization. It can easily amount to 15%-20% of your total volume, so it's an appreciable quantity.
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Other than how vigorous your boil is, the two things that affect your boil off rate that most people don't think about is the diameter of your boil kettle (surface area open to the air) and the ambient humidity. The only real danger in adding water at the end of the boil is to make sure the water is infection from something in the water. But if you use bottled water or have really clean tap water it's not a problem.
Re:Water utilization? (Score:4, Insightful)
You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected
When I first started brewing I was like this. I would measure during the boil, and make sure I added exactly the right amount of extract or water to hit the target. And then I stopped caring, and brewing became more fun. It is so much easier to not bother, and it really makes not that much difference if your beer comes out at 4.5% or 4.9%. The little bits of randomness are what makes every batch unique. I barely even bother measuring water consumption these days, just 25l at the start, and I switched to Brew In A Bag, and the beer still comes out fine. Turbo mead cider: take a few litres of apple juice, add a couple of kilos of honey, and yeast. Wait a few days, and (optionally) drink straight from the fermenter. Lazy brewing: it's great.
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I used to take this to extremes. I did a series of batches I called "human senses only" where I measured everything with no instruments. I'd throw grain into the pail until it looked "good 'nuff", I'd mash-in with more and more water until it looked "about right," hell I even gauged strike temperature by feel -- I use a beer keg as a HLT and used a combination of putting my hand momentarily against the vessel and looking at the bubbles of dissolved gas as the temp came up. I boiled for what felt like "about
LOL! Wrong (Score:2)
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Well...honestly...no.
I started out, like some others have posted here, being pretty 'anal' about every measurement, temp, weight....etc.
After awhile I found, well, it all is just like cooking and using nature. You just don't have to worry about being THAT precise. I figure if I have the right temp of volume of water for the weight of grain I have to mash with...well, that's about the largest thing I'm worried about....everything else is measured en
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Shameless plug for http://brewedbyus.com./ [brewedbyus.com.] We do not have this feature yet, but we are in the process of adding more all-grain features since the other developer and myself have just started to move from extract to all-grain.
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What exactly are you trying to get out of your water utilization? Are you trying to get a fixed starting volume or are you trying to adjust pre-boil volume to nail an original gravity? BeerSmith and ProMash can both handle the former. For the latter, the only brewer I know who does that uses ProMash but I think he does his own calcs for that part.
Re:Water utilization? (Score:5, Informative)
Where did I say that? I was merely pointing out I am not a novice brewer. But since we're on the top of hops, I brew IPAs. We use a shitload of hops, and they absorb water like crazy, so a nice, adjustable hop absorption tool would be a nice part of water utilization.
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As far as calculating hop water absorption, the closest thing you'll find is the "other absorption" category in ProMash. You'd have to set that by hand each time. When I made
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I've used BeerSmith [beersmith.com] for several years, and after a little bit of fine-tuning the parameters to match my equipment, I get very accurate water estimates. My last batch was as close as I can measure to 5 gallons in the fermentor, with no adjustment. It even has a 21 day free trial if you want to try it out. I've found it worthwhile.
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Brewtarget can calculate evaporation during boil and mash/sparge water volume. I'm not entirely happy with the mash wizard, but the volume given seem to be fairly accurate for my system.
make beer (Score:5, Funny)
$ make beer
make: *** No rule to make target `beer'. Stop.
I guess brewtarget is the configure script?
Re:make beer (Score:4, Funny)
sudo make beer
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Try Homebrew:
$ brew beer
Free as in... (Score:3)
C'mon guys, it's really simple... (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't Work (Score:5, Funny)
This software doesn't work at all! I downloaded it and it installed fine. Then I ran it, and waited for like hours, and no beer yet! Here I am sitting with my mug under the USB port, and nothing is coming out. Jeez. Damn open source software. The USB port is for input / output, right? Well, where's the damn output?
It said something about hops, so I did lots of hopping and even a little jumping, but to no avail.
Wait a minute, it's saying something about adding water. Let me go pour some water into the keyboard and see if that helps...
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You're doing it wrong. You need to put your mug in the cup holder.
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5 funny? Is this what slashdot has become?
was it ever different?
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The AC obviously has a humor deficit. I laughed out loud at it. Funny? No, it was hilarious.
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I liked it, the humour was a little forced though
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That's the problem, you're stuck on USB. The output is thru the serial port because barley is a cereal.
I love Brewtarget! (Score:2, Informative)
I've been a homebrewer for about four years now, for the last year or so have been using Brewtarget exclusively. My friends that taught me still use Beersmith and refuse to look at any other piece of software, mostly for the water chemistry tools. Personally I find using chemicals to alter water chemistry in brewing purposeless and distasteful. The whole point of brewing for the first 10,000 years of our civilized existence was to turn brackish water into a potable, drinkable beverage. It seems just plain
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Heating honey damages its flavor, and I think (don't hold me to this part) can cause a bit of haze in the final product. Think of honey flavor like you might aroma hops -- the longer you heat it the more aromatics evaporate... do it long enough and you end up with sugar that happens to be bee puke.
Instead ... you can do what wine makers do (since they rarely boil anything): dose it with a bit of sulfite to knock out any native yeast and bacteria, and then pitch brewing yeast after letting it out gas a bit (
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There's an ongoing debate about whether heating / boiling honey for mead is a good idea or a waste of perfectly good honey. The prevailing wisdom, at least among the outspoken, is that boiling is not necessary and can remove some desirable flavors. However, there's also evidence that, like many techniques, it's neither absolutely good nor absolutely bad, merely another choice that affects the results (this was based on a quasi-scientific double-blind taste test with a mead brewed from a strongly-flavored ho
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The yeast we use for brewing is basically sulfur tolerant and so, between the natives being supressed or dead and pitching a few hundred billion of 'em, the brewing yeast dominates.
Practically speaking, even without sulfites, commercially-available brewing yeast strains are so potent and pitched at such high rates that it's unlikely any wild yeasts suspended in the honey would stand a chance in competition.
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Heating honey damages its flavor
The GP, however, appears to like fermenting a bit on the wild side and letting some of those natural yeasts and bacteria compete with the yeast he's throwing into the must... different strokes for different folks.
Really it creates new caramelized flavors and colors. (Some may consider this damage.) Which some brewers like myself desire. The amount depends on the batch I am doing, some get more caramel than others. I would suggest not bringing a mead must to a full boil, that will start to break down the sugars. (I am not sure what the affects of this are. I have wanted to do a test batch with lightly heated vs boiled the crap out of it; to see the difference.)
However I agree with the wild aspect to uncooked. Also so
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The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire.
That sounds like a fermentation step - open fermentation with wild yeast - not a sterilisation step. That disclaimer is odd: "Never, ever try to reproduce this recipe using the methods described. Wild fermentation is never advisable, if you are lucky you will simply get very very ill, if not death or fates worth than death cou
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Bacteria doesn't grow in honey, heating it will make no difference except making it easier to pour. You can pour honey straight from supermarket jar into fermenter and it will be fine.
The one exception I've seen cited for this, and it passes the basic sniff test, is for honey that's crystallized. Much of the anti-fermentation/anti-spoilage power of honey results from its extremely high concentration of sugar. When it crystallizes, those crystals are regions where sugar has crystallized and pushed the water out of the solution. As a result, it's possible to leave a pocket with much lower sugar concentration where yeast/bacteria can get a foothold. In these cases, pasteurizing or perhaps b
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To date, I've only made batches of mead one gallon at a time, but this weekend I'm going for my first 5 gallon batch. I'll probably stick with boiling just
Re:I love Brewtarget! (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I find using chemicals to alter water chemistry in brewing purposeless and distasteful.
You know you are adding salts, sure they are chemicals, but saying "adding chemicals" makes it sound like you are adding polychlorinated biphenyls or something horrible like that. Calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, magnesium sulphate, etc... these are all salts, and are found naturally in water.
I personally love playing with the salts to improve the quality of my beer. It's not because I am trying to emulate the water from some particular place, but because different beer styles turn out better when the salts in the water support the chemistry of the brewing process. for instance the the hop flavor and aroma just works better in really hard water.
A travesty (Score:2)
Why is this fine application not available on Gentoo?
/me runs off to write an ebuild
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Winemakers get no love! (Score:2)
https://code.google.com/p/winebrewdb/ [google.com]
Frankly it's pretty inflexible, I only wrote exactly what I needed, no more, no less, and god knows how my "coding standards" compare to anything in the real world. But hey I'm no java developer, and it is free (as in speech and beer (or should that be
Re:Winemakers get no love! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think they included Wine support since it's a native Qt app or something....
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Interesting -- I've gotten a bit into Cyser making, and noticed the dearth of software for that too. The big thing for me has been dealing with e.g. apple cider -- it contributes gravity and volume, and none of the brewing software I've found handles doing math for ingredients like that.
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What math? All the base ciders are different (as are honeys), different densities, etc and I doubt there will ever be a database (and if there were, I wouldn't really believe a single number in it). Do you really have a target O.G.? (Maybe you do, but I don't.) If you're off your target, are you really going to do anything about it? No matter what you've got, you're gonna pitch and be happy with it.
Don't think of meads and ciders as being drinks for brewers who flunked math; think of them as drinks fo
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Well, that's what I've been doing ... five or six pounds of honey, five gallons of cider, some fruit extract, mix it all up ... ok, this is the gravity...
It still feels wrong that I'm not using science to control the entire process (eh, I started off brewing beer...)
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Well if you are low on gravity, no problem, just add more honey. If you are high... well you can add steralized water before you pitch. At least to an extent depending on how big your equipment is. (I primary 5 gallon batches in 6.5/7 gallon carbouys. Mostly for the anti-spillover features, however.) Personally I would be considering being too high on gravity a good thing. :)
I do a lot of mead and the occasional cider, but I have found cider to be much more difficult to get consistency. I created a cyzer by
Seriously? (Score:1)
Deionized water
Sugar of some kind (Molasses, honey, brown sugar, white sugar, powdered sugar, etc)
Yeast (for higher concentrations, use champagne yeast, for lower concentrations, any old yeast will do)
Flavoring (hops, fruit rinds, fruit pulp, spices, herbs, etc)
Sterilized fermentation containers
But more importantly, one doesn't really need a reason to drink.
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I'm sure medieval monks had that.
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Easy All Grain Beer (Score:2)
I found this site and it has made all of the difference. The main idea is that most brew recopies are for pros that have expensive equipment and are trying to make the most beer for the grain they have. It's an efficiency thing.
This site shows how to easily make an all grain brew with pretty simple equipment with the idea that you aren't going to get perfect extraction from the grain but who cares just use more grain since it's cheaper than a pro setup.
http://www.classiccitybrew.com/homebrew.html [classiccitybrew.com]