Introducing MIBrew, free, easy to use recipe builder

[madk]

Hello all,

For the last year or so I have been working on MIBrew - a free, easy to use tool, to help homebrewers create, discover and brew great beer. We officially launched on May 17 and now I'm introducing it here.

Some MIBrew Features:

• Create your own recipe with our easy to use tool. Simply select a style and add malt, hops, yeast and other ingredients.
• Fully integrated with Michigan Brew Supply for online ordering. Build a recipe and have your ingredients shipped to your door with a few mouse clicks.
• Create a detailed brew log to help you keep track of your brew day.
• Full recipe review system.
• Mash water and bunch of other helpful brewing calculators.
• Large database of fermentables, hops, yeast and other brewing ingredients. Support for custom ingredients.
• Mobile friendly design will work on desktops, tablets and smart phones.
• 100% free!
• If you are already a Michigan Brew Supply customer, you can log in with your existing account.
• Very active development. Based on user feedback we've already pushed out a bunch of updates with many more coming soon.

As homebrew shop owners, our goal was to create something that was easy to use and not overly complex. Our primary focus for now is recipe creation but over time we'll be adding more features in regards to brewing processes.

We are really proud of MIBrew and want to invite all of you to check it out. Let us know if you have any thoughts, comments, suggestions or criticism.

Example Recipe

https://www.mibrewsupply.com/recipe

 

[TonyKZ1]

Hmm, looks good. Thanks for sharing this with us, I also signed up for an account. I'll be testing out the recipe builder soon too.

 

[madk]

Thanks! Please let me know what you think. Next round of updates will be coming out late next week.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Playing with it still, but looks pretty good. I'm really jealous. I've been trying to implement a recipe builder into my online calculator and been pulling my hair out trying to get something to work.

Comments:

Estimate preboil volume seems inaccurate.

Yeast pitch rate should be able to be user defined as well with a textbox.

Mash and sparge water calculator should have user input for grain absorption rate.

I really like the combo box used in the style selection.

Add ingredient: I'd prefer another combobox over a popup window. There's a slight delay between typing and the selections changing.

Ingredient database seems good. Had everything I searched for except for oat malt.

The fermentables should display the yield and loviblond like the hop selections do, so they're displayed as the default but are editable.

Mash schedule does not seem to affect the FG at all.

Maybe display the calculated values on the right between the Style ranges but in a different font size/color/style?

 

[madk]

You rock! Thank you so much for this. We did about 4 months of beta testing with some key users but I know there are still things we can be doing better. See my notes below:

Estimate preboil volume seems inaccurate.

I've struggled with this for a while mostly due to my stubbornness of wanting the batch size to be the volume that is bottled / kegged after all loses. I'm rethinking and will revisit it soon.

Yeast pitch rate should be able to be user defined as well with a textbox.

Agreed and noted. The yeast portion of the recipe is very basic right now.

Mash and sparge water calculator should have user input for grain absorption rate.

I originally had this but got some confusion from newer brewers who were testing. Agreed that I should be editable. I'll re-add it and set a sane default.

I really like the combo box used in the style selection.

Thanks. Doesn't work so great on mobile but falls back gracefully.

Add ingredient: I'd prefer another combobox over a popup window. There's a slight delay between typing and the selections changing.

This is how it was originally but I found it tough to cram in all of the needed info. Probably not going to change this one anytime soon.

Ingredient database seems good. Had everything I searched for except for oat malt.

Thanks. We started with our in-store inventory and grew it from there. We allow for custom ingredients as well. We monitor these daily and if we notice a trend, we'll add it to the system and ideally, stock it in our retail shop.

The fermentables should display the yield and loviblond like the hop selections do, so they're displayed as the default but are editable.

Good point. This actually never came up in testing but I could see some power users wanting to tweak things a bit.

Mash schedule does not seem to affect the FG at all.

It doesn't at this point and is something I struggled with finding data on. If you have any resources, please send it along as I'd love to tighten that up.

Maybe display the calculated values on the right between the Style ranges but in a different font size/color/style?

This is on the to-do list.

Once again, really appreciate the feedback. Cheers!

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Anytime.

Unfortunately batch size is an existing term that's already defined as the volume into fermenter, after chiling. Packaging losses shouldn't change this. Mash tun loses and kettle losses should. If you want to keep it as it is, just rephrase as packaged volume instead.


I'll see if I can find the info on mash temp and yeast attenuation.

 

[TonyKZ1]

One thing I noticed, when I entered the BrewDog's Punk IPA recipe (yumm one of my favorite IPA's that I've made). Kudos to them for releasing their recipes to the public! Their recipe was in metric measurements of course, so when I modified it (just changed the volume of the batch), it was still in metric and not able to change it. While not really a problem, it'd be nice to be able to change it to US Customary measurements or back to metric.

 

[madk]

One thing I noticed, when I entered the BrewDog's Punk IPA recipe (yumm one of my favorite IPA's that I've made). Kudos to them for releasing their recipes to the public! Their recipe was in metric measurements of course, so when I modified it (just changed the volume of the batch), it was still in metric and not able to change it. While not really a problem, it'd be nice to be able to change it to US Customary measurements or back to metric.

Thanks for the input and really good point. I'll work on a conversion option. Right now a recipe is locked into whatever unit are used to create it.

 

[TheMadKing]

It looks like it works pretty well. It matches beersmith on most vital stats, but the hop utilization looks a tad high to me. It spit out 44 IBU on a pilsner where beersmith was only saying 31

One UI tweak might be adding a save or publish button at the bottom. I wasn't really sure how to save my recipe once I had input it, but I might have just missed something.

I also added Saflager - S-189 since it wasn't in your database.

Overall the inputs are easy to use and it's a nice clean UI with everything in a logical order, I'll definitely be using this for preliminary recipe creation before I migrate it over to beersmith with all my equipment profiles etc.

 

[madk]

...hop utilization looks a tad high to me. It spit out 44 IBU on a pilsner where beersmith was only saying 31

That's pretty far off. I'll look for your recipe and recreate it in BeerSmith to see why it varies.

One UI tweak might be adding a save or publish button at the bottom. I wasn't really sure how to save my recipe once I had input it, but I might have just missed something.

This has been a problem. The recipes automatically save, but the publish process is manual. I've gotta find a way to make it more obvious that a recipe can't be seen unless it's public. We'll probably test some new button placements in the next release.

I also added Saflager - S-189 since it wasn't in your database.

We just permanently added this.

Overall the inputs are easy to use and it's a nice clean UI with everything in a logical order, I'll definitely be using this for preliminary recipe creation before I migrate it over to beersmith with all my equipment profiles etc.

Appreciate it and let me know if anything else pops up!

 

[TheMadKing]

That's pretty far off. I'll look for your recipe and recreate it in BeerSmith to see why it varies.

I tweaked the recipe to get the IBU's within style and ran it through a few more calculators to get a range.. I think the problem was on my inputs, not your software. Thanks!

 

[madk]

I tweaked the recipe to get the IBU's within style and ran it through a few more calculators to get a range.. I think the problem was on my inputs, not your software. Thanks!

haha my favorite kind of bug! Appreciate the update.

 

[madk]

Just pushed out a rather large update to MIBrew.

https://www.mibrewsupply.com/recipe

Here is a full list of the other changes that just rolled out:

• You can now leave comments on a recipe! This will allow recipe creators and users to interact and discuss recipe details, ideas and more. You’ll find the new comments section near the bottom of the Recipe View screen.
• Corrected bug with boil volume that was throwing off OG and IBU. All recipes have been updated.
• Simplified the recipe creation process by removing Mash Tun and Fermentor loss. Kettle loss is now the only one needed.
• Batch size now is the amount you want in your fermentor. This makes us more aligned with other software and will allow us to properly import BeerXML.
• Edit Info screen has been simplified. Changed to a tab view to help better organize data.
• Recipe View screen now shows the sliders to give you a quick view of OG, FB, ABV, IBU and SRM.
• Reorganized some of the recipe meta data to better highlight author and style
• Other bug fixes and optimizations.

 

[madk]

Hey all,

Just pushed out another update for MIBrew that cleans up a bunch of bugs and introduces a few new minor features. Please check em out and let me know what you think.

MIBrew updates for 9/13/2016:

• New Feature! Recipe Family Tree - you can now view the lineage of a recipe. If it is the result of cloning an existing recipe you will be able to see the parent recipe as well as any other clones that may exist. Small Example
• Added recipe meta data (OG, batch size, etc.) to mash calculator screen.
• Added Mash Efficiency to recipe meta data for all grain and partial mash recipes.
• Cleaned up recipe print screens.
• Updated page titles for more consistency.
• Cleaned up breadcrumbs.
• Updated homepage text to say "Craft, Brew, Enjoy".
• Cleaned up abbreviations (OG vs O.G.) for more consistency.
• Updated recipe sliders to show actual recipe data.

 

[LieutenantDan]

I think putting your youtube video somewhere on the homepage would be nice for those that would like to see how everything works without signing up. I scanned around a bit and was able to view recipes and calculators but I didn't want to sign up without getting a better representation of how the recipe builder worked.

 

[madk]

Good points and thanks for posting it here. I'm actually looking at a way to create recipes without having to sign up. I think a lot of users would like that option.

 

[madk]

Hey all,

It's been awhile since my last update here. We've pushed out a few updates over the past few months with the last one just going up this evening. This new update fixes a few bugs (mostly some navigation quirks) and adds Brewing Steps to extract beers. We use and tested these a lot in-store as quick guides for new brewers putting together custom recipes.

A lot more updates coming in early 2017 - the biggest of which will be the BeerXML integration. Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season!

Cheers!

 

[pricelessbrewing]

early 2017*