Brewer's Friend Home Brewing Software

Brew Timer Upgrade

The brew timer upgrade we talked about in our July 11^th post just went live. This is awesome because a separate clock timer is no longer needed on brew day.  We can’t wait to brew again!

• The timers are saved auto-magically by the system.
• The new design allows navigation inside the brew session page, even while the timers are running.
• If your laptop falls asleep or you accidentally close your browser, when you come back to the page the timers will be right where they should be.

The new timer bar appears at the bottom of the brew session page:

The ‘Open More’ button reveals a readout of the current step and the next step. The bar will hide itself when you switch the brew status to ‘primary fermentation’.

Known issue with the timer (fixed 8/1/12):

• On some older versions of Android’s web browser, the bar will not stay in the correct position in portrait mode. We are currently working on a fix for this. We didn’t want to hold up the release because of it.
  Update 8/1/12 – This is fixed! We also made some improvements to how dialogs perform on Android.

Given this is a newly released feature, and a rather involved one, there could be small issues.  Please let us know if you spot anything and we’ll jump on it.

Other items released, which came from feature requests in the forum:

• Boil gravity is now displayed by the Recipe Editor under the ‘More…’ dialog.
  See the topic in the forum.
• Recipe Editor displays all the matching styles based on the batch stats.
  See the topic in the forum.

Features Up Next:

• Support for metric units being added to stand alone calculators.
• Hydrometer temperature correction calculator will support temperatures up to 159F, and will allow for different hydrometer calibrations. This will go into the brew log and the stand alone calculator. (Update 8/3 – this is now live!)
• In design phase: group brewing, yeast pitching calculator.

Early release users – if you haven’t purchased yet, for each month you participated in the early release you will be granted an extra month of subscription time when you purchase. This offer expires August 31st, just a month away.

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Early Release Ended – Subscriptions Available

The Early Release period is complete. The Brewer’s Friend subscription based service is now live.

Brewer’s Friend saves you time, helps your brewing go more smoothly, and leads to better home brewed beer.

The price is $9.99 per year for Premium Members, or $17.99 for two years. We offer an unlimited duration trial so new users can get to know us over their next few batches. The blog, forum, calculators and brew sheets continue to be free. However, going past more than five recipes or five brew sessions will require a Premium Membership. As part of the conversion, everyone who signed up previously now has a Trial Membership.

More Details Here:

• Features and Pricing Page
• FAQs

To Our Early Release Members:

To say thank you to members who signed up during the early release, for each month you participated in the early release you will be granted an extra month of subscription time when you purchase. Early release users also have the option of buying an exclusive, limited quantity, Lifetime Membership.

This offer is only valid until August, 31st, 2012.

If you decide not to purchase, you may continue to edit all your existing recipes and brew sessions, even if you had more than five.

The Brewer’s Friend team would like to thank you for the feedback, praise, and the beer recipes you shared!

How to purchase:

Login, or signup first, then look for the upgrade button in the upper right hand corner.

Major feature upgrade planned for the next release:

• The brew timer will keep ticking even if you your computer goes to sleep or you happen to change pages during your brew. (This is driving some of us at Brewer’s Friend a little nuts and we really want to fix this soon.)

By the way, profile pictures are looking great on the recipes and the search page. Here are a few collages we made, fun times!

Stay tuned for more blog posts!

Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments »

Quick feature update

• No Chill – extended hop boil time calculation now supported. Click the ‘More…’ button in the recipe editor. Look for the No Chill – Extended Hop Boil Time field.
• A value of between 5 and 15 minutes should more accurately represent the IBUs for the batch. We leave it up to you decide.
• With a no chill batch, the hops continue to impart bitterness after the boil is done because the temperature drops so gradually.
• Boil time of zero now allowed. This comes into play for meads and ciders.
• Responsive Design: Site looks better at any resolution and performs better on smart phones and tablets!
• Misc: Tuned rounding logic inside mash calculator, corrected sorting of brew log entries, system more smoothly handles brewing an all grain batch in BIAB mode or vice versa, site performance optimized.

PROST!

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New features launched

New features were rolled out recently:

• Brewer’s Profile Pages – under your profile section you may upload a picture and setup a public profile. See my profile as an example. We encourage everyone to upload an inspiring beer-tastic profile picture! The picture appears on your profile (if you choose to make it public) and your public recipes. 
  

• Update 6/4 – Water Chemistry Profiles – under your profile section, you can input your local water profile. Water profiles can be shared and are published here!
• The recipe editor as has a new feature for pre-made target water profiles.  If you see one that is missing that you regularly use, please contact us.
• An upcoming release will tie the source water and target water concepts together.  The brew feature will compute the brewing salt additions (or dilutions) necessary to go from the recipe’s target water profile to your profile.
• IBUs – calculations now appear per hop addition on the recipe builder.
• Mash Calculator – added to the brew feature. Tracks how much water you need to mash, does infusion temperature calculations. Incorporates your brewing profile and the recipe so all the numbers are automatically calculated.  Let us know what you think! Update 6/4 – partial mash and BIAB are now supported too!
  

• Fixes – a number of bugs in the recipe editor related to back button, sorting, etc.
• Added yeasts and updated ppg values for grains.

By the way, did you know you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook ?

Posted in Announcements | 4 Comments »

New Calculators for Priming and Kegging Launched

Just launched the following calculators:

Priming Sugar and Keg PSI Calculators:

• Priming Calculator – Calculates how much priming sugar is needed. Works with table sugar, corn sugar, and DME.
• Keg Carbonation Calculator – Calculates regulator PSI setting based on desired volumes of CO2 and temperature.

Posted in Announcements | 3 Comments »

1.09 Launched – Random Beer Brewing Goodness

• Ability to sort hops and grains (see buttons in each box). Hops sorting is based on the order the hops would be used in the recipe.  Grain sorting is by weight.  Several users wrote in about this, and it started bothering us too!  Now you can add/edit hops all you want, and hit the ‘Sort Hops’ button to get a nice and tidy listing.
• Selecting a hop use of ‘Dry Hop’ will change the time box to ‘days’ instead of ‘min.’.  All existing Dry Hop entries have been set to 7 days (just this one time because of the change in this release).
• Added URL field to Recipe Editor below the notes field. The input field is only visible if you are logged in and have confirmed your email address.  This will help keep the content at Brewer’s Friend of a high quality and deter spammers.  When a URL is set, it will appear under the recipe’s name on the recipe view page.
• In Other Ingredients section allows grams and ounces to be specified for both US and Metric units.
• Added Extra Light DME, Extra Light LME, and clarified Canadian 2-row in grain list.
• Added 8 types of hops and updated the average AA value on several others. Thank you John H!
• Fixed bug with backspace key reported by Brian at https://thebrewmentor.com/.

• Added ‘Rebuild’ tab to Brew Session which allows you to recompute the brew steps and water requirements without deleting a recreating the brew. This is useful if you changed the recipe or profile settings after the brew was created.  This also resets all the brew steps that were checked off.
• Added ‘Recipe View’ tab to Brew Session. This makes it easy to see the ingredients in the recipe without having to navigate away from the Brew Session page.
• Temperature adjustment field allows more than 3 characters.

• Mobile support improved on recipe view and search pages.  Try it out and send us feedback.
• If you have not confirmed your email address, you will now see a red status about this in the upper right hand corner with a ‘resend’ button you can use to trigger the email again. Certain features, like adding a URL to a recipe are blocked until you confirm your email address.

Posted in Announcements | 13 Comments »

1.08 Launched – Lots of small stuff

• Ability to check off steps on the Brew Steps tab of a Brew Session:

• In hops section when Hop Use is set as Dry Hop, First Wort, or Mash the minutes box is disabled. Minutes do not factor into the calculation for these hop uses and this update makes that clear.
• Ability to edit Brew Log entries.
• Recipe search preferences are saved between visits to the site (must have cookies enabled).
• Added comments section to public recipes.
• Scaling by efficiency now understands mashable vs non-mashable custom fermentables.

Posted in Announcements | 5 Comments »

1.07 Launched – Search, Dashboard, Late Additions

Hello fellow brewers,
Please raise your glasses to the 1.07 launch of Brewer’s Friend!

This launch includes what you’ve been asking for – recipe search, late additions, and a brewing dashboard!

Recipe Search:

The Beer Recipe Search Feature is live!  Every category has a handful of recipes.  There are even a good number of metric recipes from our friends across the globe!

Late Additions and Custom Fermentable Upgrade:

1. The recipe editor now supports late boil additions. Late additions do not count towards boil gravity. This is important for Extract brewers who want to maximize their hops utilization.
2. Custom fermentables may be marked as late additions and have their mash setting toggled. When the mash setting is checked, the ppg contribution is reduced by the mash efficiency value for the recipe.
3. For convenience, PPG and Lovibond are displayed in the expanded view below the selected fermentable.

Brewing Dashboard and My Recipe/Brewing Filtering and Sorting:

The My Brewing Dashboard shows how many recipes you have created, how many times you have brewed, and provides links to items you worked on recently. Below the dashboard is a listing of your public recipes and how many times they have been viewed and brewed.

As part of this upgrade, the my recipes and my brewing page can be sorted and filtered.

Other improvements:

• Recipe view page now displays the brew sessions that you have performed on this recipe (helps with navigation). Only you are able to see this information, even if the recipe is public.
• Mashed hops count as a 5 minute boil addition for IBU calculation purposes. FWH is still 20.
• Improvements to Brew Timer.
• Increased size of notes fields boxes on recipe edtior.
• The searchable flag has been removed – all public recipes are searchable. By default recipes are private.
• The fermentables drop down will only show non-mashable ingredients for Extract style recipes. There were 82 recipes marked extract that had mashable fermentables in their grain bill, these fermentable items were converted to custom fermentables so they could be preserved. Users who notice this may want to move those items down to steeping grains.
• Minor bug fixes.

Stay tuned for 1.08 which will include more hoppy goodness from the team at Brewer’s Friend!

Posted in Announcements | 6 Comments »

1.06 Launched – Batch Performance

This launch places the cap stone on the brew session section –  Batch Performance. The numbers behind a batch of beer are a big deal to pro brewers. Home brewers can benefit from these numbers as well. I tend to obsess over post-brew stats like ABV, attenuation, expected OG vs actual OG, and efficiency. In fact, before this tool existed I would spend a lot of time at my computer calculating and saving these numbers. It becomes quite a chore. Thankfully with this latest release of Brewer’s Friend everything is automatically calculated.

By recording the appropriate brew logs, such as ‘Brew Day Complete’,  or ‘Fermentation Complete’, check marks on the batch performance tab turn green and the results are provided. Understanding what these numbers mean and how to control them is key to dialing in repeatable batches!  We hope this is a time saver for all brewers. I know I will enjoy using it and have already inputted many of my recent batches.

Another big improvement in this release is on the recipe editor. Now you can see the grain bill percentages as you enter amounts:

Bug fixes:

• Extract recipes with steeping grains now support metric units. Thank you to the brewers who noticed this, excellent reporting!
• Fixed Wyeast Extra Special Bitter 1968 (was mis-numbered, doh).

Many folks are asking for recipe search.  1.07 or 1.08 will most likely include that feature.   You can help by adding more of your recipes and marking them public and searchable.   To keep the content high quality, recipes need a rating system with some kind of community moderation. That’s what we will be working on in the near future.  We may do away with the ‘searchable’ flag and just stick with public vs private recipes. What do you think??

Posted in Announcements | 10 Comments »

1.05 is launched – Brew Timer

Thank you to everyone who wrote in with suggestions for improving 1.04. This release was focused on an innovation we created called the Brew Timer. More information on that below. We also made some basic user interface improvements (very small changes), added additional yeasts, and updated the scaling logic.

The 1.05 launch includes:

• Ability to scale recipes as small as 1 gallon or 1 liter.
• Added Fly Sparge and Sparge as options under Mash Step type drop down.
• Added 10 additional Wyeast varieties (special release strains).

Advanced Mode in the Recipe Builder:

In case you have never tried it, the OG/FG panel expands and allows you to choose which equations are used to calculate ABV, IBU, and SRM. The expanded view shows the stats for the target style. The selected equations are customizable on a per recipe basis. The defaults can be setup in your account profile.

Clicking on the ‘More…’ button (or the triangle on the far left) expands the advanced options for the recipe:

Brew Timer:

Currently in BETA (running inside an alpha release), we are proud to roll out the new Brew Timer feature in version 1.05. You will never need to worry about missing a step in the brewing process with this little beauty. First design your recipe then click on the Brew tab. From there click on the Brew Timer tab. This widget will walk you through your entire brew, start to finish, based on the step profile generated for your batch. It has built in timers! The mash steps, and each boil addition gets their own timer. Everything is planned out in advance, and you won’t forget to add your hops at just the right time. The Brew Timer is in beta right now, so we encourage folks to play with it but not rely on it at this point.

With the Brew Timer, no more printing out papers and no more fiddling with a clock timer. We would like to hear your suggestions on Facebook, via comments on this blog post, or through our feedback page.

What’s next:
The next release will focus on automatic calculation of Brewhouse Efficiency and ABV through the Brew page and Brew Log records.

Posted in Announcements | 18 Comments »