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:Water utilization? (Score:3, Informative)
ProMash does a great job with this. By far the best brewing software I've used.
Re:Water utilization? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
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 wrong to chemically alter your water so it is "the same" as water from Belgium or the Rockies or whatever. Obviously if someone has so much minerals in their water and it imparting the iron funk or something like that I can understand it, but just get a filter and call it good. Then again I also don't use campden or heat my meade and wine musts so I'm pretty much a heretic in whatever brewing company I'm in.
Anyway, I love Brewtarget and I'm glad to see they have some new features to be implemented soon. Also glad to see so many home brewers in the FLOSS world, not many #homebrew posts on the *Diaspora I've noticed.
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.
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.