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The yeast list is too encompassing. Having hefe and the other odd yeasts in there could ruin your end product. I would suggest a single D4 for to determine american, irish, german or english yeast strains only. At least then you final product doesnt risk being a black IPA fermented at 90 with saison yeast.
 
I created an Excel 'random beer ingredients' generator this afternoon. I used all the all-grain ingredients my local shop stocks, so its got plenty of malts even if the list is not all-encompassing. You push the macro button and it randomly tells you:

what your beer OG is,
what number and percentage of malts to use,
what your total IBUs should be,
a list hops to use,
and a yeast style.

The hops addition values and times are left for you to sort out to your liking. Its pretty interesting what a random roll will net you.

Here are a few pics of the output. After playing with it for a while it becomes very clear why pro-brewers don't randomly combine ingredients for a brew. Anyone interested in the excel sheet?

SMASH Example.jpg


MORE COMPLEX Example.jpg
 
Can we have a keeper of the list and have them roll, and reveal to to each person what they need to brew?

We could swap, post, and detail the outcomes!
 
The yeast list is too encompassing. Having hefe and the other odd yeasts in there could ruin your end product. I would suggest a single D4 for to determine american, irish, german or english yeast strains only. At least then you final product doesnt risk being a black IPA fermented at 90 with saison yeast.

People scared of risk shouldn't play with dice. Sometimes there be dragons. Sometimes there be saison yeast. All times there be bears.
 
This thread is relevant to my interests. The resulting brew should be called "Random Encounter" or "Wandering Monster"

This post is killing me.

We all have our imaginary brewery names, mine is Confederate Dragon Brewery (which nods to both my Southern heritage and my geek background). I have artist pals do artwork for me for every brew; the central figure is always a red dragon in a Confederate soldier's uniform.

Wandering Monster/Ranom Encounter would just fit my label scheme ridiculously well!
 
Sounds like fun, but perhaps it's worthwhile rolling, say, n+5 recipes, and tossing out a few that will be pretty obviously awful? Like something with 1.08 gravity and 5 IBUs? Or something with 98 IBUS and no flavor or dry hops?
 
BUG FIX: I went back through the logic and fixed an issue where you get a SMASH 50% of the time. It is much, much less likely now.

The basic logic is that the spreadsheet decides how many malts will be in the beer with a max of 7. At least one malt MUST be a basemalt and basemalts make up at least 75 percent of the grist. You can change that value if you like. There could be up to 7 basemalts in a beer though from the random number generator.

If there are less than 7 basemalts, it checks to see if crystal malts made their saving through. If so, it decides how many Crystals malts will go in (up to 6 from the long list) and then Roasted Malts get a chance to make a saving throw and if so, it adds them. (up to 6 from the long list). Then it figures how many hop varieties go into the beer (5 max) and picks the names. Its a little more complex than that, but you can noodle through it.

To make this work, you need to enable macros for this worksheet and you need to turn your calculation setting to manual. F9 is the default recalculation key if you need to use it.

If you know much about excel its pretty easy to go in and add and subtract ingredients, but if you change the number of each you need to futz with the calculations which should be self evident. The 'main' sheet is only a condensed print-out of the 'background' sheet which has all the data tables, IF statements and the VLOOKUP statements. If I had to do it again, I would vastly simplify the data tables to allow user additions and provide the ability to specify upper RANDBETWEEN values on the fly. Maybe I'll do it later.

Here is a dropbox link to the Excel Macro-Enabled file: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/76184517/Random Beer generator.xlsm
 
I REALLY REALLY want to laugh at this, but then I remember that I have more than a few d'n' dice in a lovely box labeled "Battletech" somewhere in my mom's basement and I actually went looking for it over Thanksgiving....hey, theres a tech readout 2750 in there!

Anyway, I am so much on board with this and think I might just be taking nutty gnome's sheet and going to another level. A little randbetween() here and some if(if(if(if(if()))) there...

...yes, this could shape up nicely...
 
There is surely a lot that could be done. Have fun and share what you create!

I was hitting the recalculate button a few hundred times today and looking at the output. It was amusing to see that some of the beers looked worthy of a brew day.
 
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