Introducing Brewtoad

Hi!

My name is Kyle. I'm a software engineer and homebrewer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. About six months ago, in an effort learn more about the science of brewing, I started writing a simple beer recipe editor. Once I had something that worked, I started showing a few friends at work...

Fast forward a few months. My current employer, Ackmann & Dickenson, has thrown some of its best resources at the project, and we've managed to turn my simple web application into something I'm hugely proud of.

Seeing as I learned almost everything I know about brewing from lurking on the forums here on homebrewtalk, I thought it was only fitting that I give something back.

So, in honor of National Homebrew Day and our friends at Homebrewtalk, we'd like to announce the beta release of Brewtoad, and invite everyone to hop in and let us know what they think.

http://www.brewtoad.com

Here's what we're offering for our beta release:

• Interactive recipe editor with realtime calculation and graphical display of OG, FG, IBU, ABV, color, and balance.
  
• BJCP styles are fully integrated. See how closely your recipe conforms to its style while you work on it.
  
• Advanced recipe search. Filter by ingredients, properties, style, and more.
  
• BeerXML import with support for multiple recipes in one file (export coming soon). Upload your entire library in one shot.
  
• Support for custom fermentables, hops, and yeasts.
  
• Facebook login integration.
  
• Comment on recipes or share on Facebook and Twitter.
  
• An intelligent ranking algorithm which takes into account how many people have saved a recipe, commented on it, its age, and more.
  
• Modern, responsive UI built with HTML5 and CSS3. Support for smartphones and tablets. Chrome frame support for old versions of IE.

The Brewtoad dev team is tiny (I write the code, Chris does the UI), and we're as passionate about homebrewing as we are about creating great software.

So, we're here and we want to know what you think. Request features, report bugs. Tell us what you love, and what you're not crazy about.

Prost!

P.S., We've got a booth at the AHA conference this year, so stop by and say hi!

Very nice, great interface!

Thanks! We think that creating your recipes should be (almost) as fun as brewing them. I've passed a link to this thread on to Chris the UI dude; I'm sure he'll appreciate the praise!

Looks pretty cool. I'm glad to see you incorporated BeerXML as well.

Indeed. BeerXML is way cool, however matching incoming ingredients can be a serious pain.

Brewtoad has a pretty comprehensive ingredient database, but it can still be tough to match an incoming ingredient with what we've got on file. While we do our best to use the ingredient names exactly as they're specified by the maltster, laboratory, etc. many of the other systems that write BeerXML have truly awful names for their ingredients.

When we can't find a match for an incoming ingredient, the BeerXML importer silently creates a custom ingredient under that user's account.

Probably more information than you wanted, but I like talking about this stuff

Looks really good, have some miner complaints about metric system not working.

have you thought about making the project Open Source and creating a community around it.

I my self am a software engineer an would like to get into developing on a brewing system in my spare time. And would be grate not to have to start from scratch and i defiantly dont have the UI skills needed. so would be grat just to be able to contribute.

Good job. Looks great!

Just playing with this, but you should be very proud. Your UI work is fantastic.

My only suggestions would be to show grain bill items as a percentage which would really help with specialty malt formulations. Also, it's a nice touch when SRM scales with your additions. For example, making a stout at 64L and the scale just shows white to red...it would be a nice touch if the color scale more closely resembled the SRM results.

Super cool! As a homebrewer just getting into programming, I am envious. Well done.

I use brewtoad and its pretty awesome. not as much functionality as a program like beersmith, but it is a simple easy to use interface with a lot of functionality. For all but the advanced brewer, this should be a site everyone can/should utilize.

Agree with everyone else, the UI is pretty slick. The fermentables are a bit hard to navigate since some are listed by standard generic namess and some are listed by brand first like Chateau Munich, instead of Munich (Chateau). This throws me off a bit since I think alphabetically by the type of grain and then expect to see variations in parentheses after it... but it's nothing I can't wrap my slow brain around. I'll be playing around with it more over christmas, it looks like it could turn into something super snappy. Love the

Is there any chance your "smartphone and tablet" support could include some kind of button to push to start making the recipe? Once pressed, it would start walking you through the recipe like...

• Heat HLT to ___F (click ok to continue)
• Add ____ from your grain bill (click ok to start mash timer)
• 60 minute mash timer countdown. alarm sounds at 0:00
• Add ___gal of ___F water to sparge (click ok to continue)
• ...

All the way through the recipe. This would make it infinitely more useful. Thanks!

Hi Kyle,

I am a Hopsville user, and have been for quite a while. I have played around with BrewToad and I like the interface, it seems very easy to use. However I hope the mash water calc comes back, that was a critical feature for me and many who use Beer Calculus.

LOL, I went looking for brewtoad support here as well hoping for the exact same thing. I was going to make a recipe and noticed that it didn't have that. I also noticed that you can't just enter the FG for your brew, you have to play around with the attenuation slider to adjust the FG. It looks really cool, however I'm just considering buying beersmith now since I don't want to go through another recipe transition like this one. A bunch of my recipes were changed when they were imported from hopville because brewtoads ingredient list was incomplete. For example all recipes that used Pacific Jade hops had Pacific Jade switched to Pacific Gem, Hallertauer Hersbrucker was changed to Hallertauer Aroma etc. I want to like brewtoad and I'm hoping that these are just hiccups associated with a massive database transition.

I want them to bring back the feature from Hopville where you input actual OGs/FGs and it tells you your efficiencies...

But overall, it seems like a reasonably decent piece of software. The interface on my phone seems much better.

Another Hopville import who agrees with the prior comments - I really like this brewing software, but miss the feature that allowed me to compare calculated gravities to actual, measured OG and FG. Also kind of miss a print format option, as I would print my recipes to take to the homebrew store and to use on brewday, although that's a pretty minor comment. Overall, I really like the interface and the look of this software.

I can't figure out how to change a previous brew date on a recipe after I made changes to the recipe and brewed again. Not a biggie but kinda buggin me.

grasshopperfirestarter said:

I can't figure out how to change a previous brew date on a recipe after I made changes to the recipe and brewed again. Not a biggie but kinda buggin me.

Click to expand...

Yeah, this is something that I also noted (I think my problem is the same as yours anyway) -- I brew a pale ale every year, but sometimes tweak it a bit, and like to save my notes, numbers, etc. for each brewday. On Hopville, I could just open that recipe (say, Pale Ale 2012) and re-save it with some tweaks as "Pale Ale 2013". The 2012 would still be there. I can't figure out how to do that on Brewtoad. It seems likely you just have to re-enter the whole recipe.

BB

As of 5 minutes ago you can change to brew date and some of the water specs.

It appears that all of the process specs from hopville are gone now though. Hopville would provide the quantity and temperature of your mash water additions as well as sparges. This was one of the major reasons I used Hopville and brewtoad got rid of that when they took over the show.
Am I missing something here or did they buy up Hopville and then remove the features that made it successful?

johngaltsmotor said:

It appears that all of the process specs from hopville are gone now though. Hopville would provide the quantity and temperature of your mash water additions as well as sparges. This was one of the major reasons I used Hopville and brewtoad got rid of that when they took over the show.
Am I missing something here or did they buy up Hopville and then remove the features that made it successful?

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, that appears to be the case. Brewtoad is not an awful tool by any stretch but there's enough missing that I bit the bullet and spent an hour figuring out how to map my weird BIAB setup onto Beersmith... time well spent, probably. I wish Brewtoad all the best, though, because the UI is slick as hell! Maybe I'll be back when the gravity estimates mesh with reality, and when changing batch size on my phone doesn't destroy the recipe.