Brewing Beer With Free Software

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.)

Comments

The original Free as in Beer

[DaMattster]

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!

Re:The original Free as in Beer

[motorsabbath]

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! ;-)

Free Beer

[MrEricSir]

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?

Re:Free Beer

[MrHanky]

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?

[unassimilatible]

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.

Re:Water utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

ProMash does a great job with this. By far the best brewing software I've used.

Re:Water utilization?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[cwaters]

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.

Re:Water utilization?

[chrb]

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.

Re:Water utilization?

[unassimilatible]

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.

make beer

[Anonymous Coward]

$ make beer
  make: *** No rule to make target `beer'. Stop.

I guess brewtarget is the configure script?

Re:make beer

[mug funky]

sudo make beer

C'mon guys, it's really simple...

[awshidahak]

The beer is free as in speech, not as in beer.

Doesn't Work

[kbob88]

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...

Re:Winemakers get no love!

[Stele]

I don't think they included Wine support since it's a native Qt app or something....

Re:I love Brewtarget!

[ukemike]

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.