Brewing Beer With Free Software

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Brewing Beer With Free Software

Posted by Unknown on Monday March 12, 2012 @10:48AM from the free-as-in-freedom-beer dept.

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.)

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The original Free as in Beer by DaMattster · 2012-03-12 10:54 · Score: 5, Informative

Anyone interested should google Greg Lehey. He was the guy that practically coined the phrase, "Free as in Beer." He has been using FreeBSD to assist in beer brewing for many years!
1. Re:The original Free as in Beer by motorsabbath · 2012-03-12 11:20 · Score: 3, 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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Free Beer by MrEricSir · 2012-03-12 11:02 · Score: 4, 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?
If so, was it any good?

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1. Re:Free Beer by MrHanky · 2012-03-12 14:03 · Score: 4, 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? by unassimilatible · 2012-03-12 11:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

My biggest complaint with brewing software is its water utilization tools, or lack thereof. It's kinda nice to know exactly how much you're going to need in advance, without using the marked wooden spoon method. I say this as an all-grain brewer who grows his own hops.

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1. Re:Water utilization? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-12 11:20 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  ProMash does a great job with this. By far the best brewing software I've used.
2. Re:Water utilization? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-12 11:23 · 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.
3. Re:Water utilization? by cwaters · 2012-03-12 11:44 · 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.
4. Re:Water utilization? by silky1 · 2012-03-12 12:05 · Score: 2
  
  Beer smith does a great job and more active support than Promash. Ultimately though paper and pencil is the best way to get your system calibrated then you can plug all those numbers into a beer making software of your choice to make future batches easier to produce. I like the idea of "free" home brewing software and am even interesting in helping the development, but I always found the ones I tried to me lacking enough to make them hard to choose over the commercial versions.
5. Re:Water utilization? by hal2814 · 2012-03-12 12:11 · Score: 2
  
  Growing your own hops doesn't have anything to do with water utilization. Even if you're using fresh hops, the amount of additional moisture is negligible.
  
  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.
6. Re:Water utilization? by honkycat · 2012-03-12 12:40 · Score: 2
  
  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.
7. Re:Water utilization? by tomhath · 2012-03-12 13:08 · Score: 2
  
  Just curious - how much do you boil off? I've never bothered to measure. When it goes into the fermenter I add water to reach the desired OG; I can't imagine how it would make any difference if you add the water at the beginning or at the end but I suppose some aficionados would see it differently.
8. Re:Water utilization? by honkycat · 2012-03-12 13:14 · Score: 2
  
  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.
9. Re:Water utilization? by chrb · 2012-03-12 14:04 · Score: 3, 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.
10. Re:Water utilization? by MrHanky · 2012-03-12 14:06 · Score: 2
  
  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.
11. Re:Water utilization? by unassimilatible · 2012-03-12 15:19 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Growing your own hops doesn't have anything to do with water utilization. Even if you're using fresh hops, the amount of additional moisture is negligible.
  
  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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12. Re:Water utilization? by pclminion · 2012-03-12 16:56 · Score: 2
  
  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 an hour" and added hops at what seemed like the right times.
  Believe me, you REALLY get to know your rig this way, and it's incredibly fun. Just stay sober while doing it, because it distorts your sense of time and space! And yes, as you'd expect, the most difficult part is getting the strike temperature right. If you fuck that up you can ruin the batch right from the beginning.
  Having to stop drinking beer was like a friend dying :-(
make beer by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-12 11:14 · Score: 5, Funny

$ make beer
make: *** No rule to make target `beer'. Stop.
I guess brewtarget is the configure script?
1. Re:make beer by mug+funky · 2012-03-12 12:41 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  sudo make beer
Free as in... by wjcofkc · 2012-03-12 11:33 · Score: 2

I'm so confused.

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C'mon guys, it's really simple... by awshidahak · 2012-03-12 11:40 · Score: 4, Funny

The beer is free as in speech, not as in beer.
Doesn't Work by kbob88 · 2012-03-12 11:59 · 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...
1. Re:Doesn't Work by Stele · 2012-03-12 13:25 · Score: 2
  
  You're doing it wrong. You need to put your mug in the cup holder.
I love Brewtarget! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-12 12:22 · 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.
1. Re:I love Brewtarget! by ukemike · 2012-03-12 14:12 · Score: 3, 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.
  
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2. Re:I love Brewtarget! by honkycat · 2012-03-12 14:34 · Score: 2
  
  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 honey). It certainly seems to be the case that a full boil is not necessary, and even a pastuerization step is probably paranoid.
  As for sulfites, these aren't particularly new to meadmaking afaik. They're discussed in Ken Schramm's "The Compleat Meadmaker" and I know I'd seen them suggested online prior to reading that book.
Winemakers get no love! by InsaneLampshade · 2012-03-12 13:14 · Score: 2

There does seem to be a complete dearth of similar free software for the home wine brewer... to the point where I ended up deciding to learn how to program, and wrote something for myself in the space of a few weeks:

https://code.google.com/p/winebrewdb/

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 wine?)) & multi-platform (probably)!
1. Re:Winemakers get no love! by Stele · 2012-03-12 13:26 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I don't think they included Wine support since it's a native Qt app or something....
Re:Seriously? by Hognoxious · 2012-03-13 03:53 · Score: 2

Deionized water
I'm sure medieval monks had that.

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