recipe recommendation by inventory?

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Malric

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Does anyone know if there is a site that will list recipes by your current inventory.

Example: I input that I have cascade, simcoe and crystal 60. It locates a match or partial match.
 
I have never heard of such and doubt there is anything like that. There are just so many variables that it would make designing a program like that a nightmare.
 
I would think that a straight ingredient to recipe pull would be easy. The partial matching might be somewhat difficult. I'm honestly surprised that this isn't available anywhere.
 
I'm already at that point, however, I like the option of seeing what has already been done. Think of it as breaking a trail in the woods vs finding a game path. It looks like brew toad, aka hopville has something similar. Closest that I've seen so far.

http://www.brewtoad.com/
 
Google: "cascade, simcoe and crystal 60 site:homebrewtalk.com"
Googling all sites should get you more.

I got this post, and several recipes.
 
I appreciate the responses, but I'm not sure that I'm conveying the idea well. Essentially, this would be a site or stand alone program that would allow for multiple variable searches based on your current inventory. For example, you have 6 types of hops, 4 types of grain and 1 type of yeast. This search would allow you to see recipes based on any or all of those.

Recipe 1: Hops 1 & 3, Grain 1, Yeast 1
Recipe 2: Hops 5, Grain 2 & 4, Different yeast (notes that it is not in inventory)
Recipe 3: Hops 2 & 4, Grain 1 & 3 (notes that you do not have sufficient quantity in stock), Yeast 1

This would allow brewers who are not comfortable with recipe formulation to buy bulk ingredients and locate recipes or form a new recipe based on similar results.

Disclaimer: I do buy bulk and formulate most of my own recipes. I thought this would be a handy tool.
 
I looked around for something similar before and also was not able to come up ith anything...ended up just throwing all my ingredients together and came up with a very good beer!

I think it would be a really cool program/website if someone ever created it!
 
I think the point has been made that this would be a herculean task to program. The only way it could really work would be to search inventory against a huge database of pre-existing recipes. Unless someone wanted to manually categorize and enter the data for every recipe in the HBT recipe section, there isn't really a better way of doing it.

It's hard to "teach" a computer BJCP styles and even more difficult to THEN have it figure out which ingredients should be combined in which ways to create a drinkable beer. Plus, most folks who buy ingredients in bulk tend to have a pretty good handle on recipe formulation, or at least know how to find what they're looking for.
 
It would certainly be CPU intensive and would probably be best suited for non web applications.

It would be fairly simple to code if recipes were all stored in similar format.
 
Not really. It seems limited to a single grain or a single hop choice.

Let's say I am sitting on: ( I am actually sitting on like 50 speciatly grain types and 20 hops varieties)
1LB aromatic
1LB biscuit malt
12LBS golden promise
2oz EKG hops

And want to find a single recipe that maximizes these ingredients so that I can use them up because they are getting stale.


The BeerTools Recipe Generator seems more useful than the search, but it would be neat if it had suggestions for selecting specialty grains based on popular recipes. Would be neat too if the software already knew what inventory I had on hand.
 
A good starting point would be a database of all recipes from books and web pages. Beersmith and other programs already output the recipe and statistics. You just need to standardize the output somehow. Then Like was suggested have a table of available ingredients and find recipes that that you have ingredients for. If you return them in order of most available ingredients ie; I have everything, I'm missing 1 ingredient, missing 2 ingredients,.., missing x ingredients; the project gets simpler. Creating software that designs recipes from what's on hand gets very complicated, almost philisophical for things other than SMaSH recipes. Even then, how do you decide hop timings?

Still requires more programming skill than I have.
 
Beer Alchemy does this. You can select choose the 'Select A Recipe' feature and it shows you what beers you have 'Ready to Go' based on currently inventory, 'One Ingredient Needed', 'Two Ingredients Needed', etc. a neat feature that I think is what you are looking for?

Edit: I realize this is not exactly what you are looking for after reading you post again. You basically want the feature of Beer Alchemy plus the recipes? Beer Alchemy only selects based off your saved recipes so you could put together a list from HBT or Designing Great Beers, Radical Brewing, etc.
 
Kaz, sounds like we need to petition HBTers, BrewSmith, and every other recipe formulator to output their recipes in a standard format(XML, JSON?) so a comprehensive database can be constructed.
 
Kaz, sounds like we need to petition HBTers, BrewSmith, and every other recipe formulator to output their recipes in a standard format(XML, JSON?) so a comprehensive database can be constructed.

That would be quite the project but a very cool idea. Not sure about the other software, but Beer Alchemy can export to ProMash (.rec), BeerXML (.xml), html (.html) and PDF (.pdf).

One feature that I would love to see for brewing software it a "cloud" feature where you could do exactly as you describe - build a database from other people's recipes or w/e and have access to them through the software so you could utilize the BeerAlchemy feature to Suggest A Recipe as the OP described.
 
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