We’re making a imperial stout today. Woo. We adapted this recipe by upping the two row and dropping the carafoam. We also changed the yeast to Scottish Ale. I’m really looking forward to this one. Full recipe and post details to come shortly.
Just a bit. I’m going to start blogging about brewing on here too. I’ve semi done it in the past, but officially I will start to blog about making beer, as well as making software for beer (not that I’m doing much of that at the moment). I’ve also started a new endeavor, bikefromscratch.com where I talk about bikes.
Work is continuing on brew manager, although not at the pace I’d like. I was not able to take the extra week off I had been hoping for, perhaps later in January. I have been able to get recipe creation in good enough shape that I think it can be used. This means I’ll probably launch it in some limited form in the next few weeks. I’ve been working on trying to get the look and feel to not suck. Thus far I’ve been unsuccessful on these fronts, but I’m reading more and working on it so we will see what comes of it. Designing things that look good turns out to be harder than I’d anticipated. I’ve been mucking with CSS positioning and really just trying to learn how to do things with CSS. I’m picking it up, but slowly for sure. Maybe its time to go buy a book.
Even if it looks terrible I’ll put something up so I don’t have to keep using google docs to store my recipes. Keeping them in documents isn’t working out for me. Not enough structure and I lack the self discipline to force myself to do it in a free form document.
I just finished up being able to add steps to a boil and remove them based off the ingredients in the recipe. I’m going to muck with how hops work one more time, and possibly how the database is seeded and then I should be ready to launch something. woo.
In other news I’ve been brewing quite a bit and started doing beer reviews for another blog, beerporn. Lately I’ve been trying to make quicker beers since most of what we have in the fermenters is long term (a lambic and two Flanders reds). We bottled a pale that turned out really well, just bottled a porter and have a breakfast stout in the primary that I’m really excited about. The breakfast stout should end up with a low ABV and taste a bit like maple syrup.
Not much progress on the site as we’ve had a bunch going on with work lately. I’ll get back at it in earnest next week. In the mean time Ian and I bottled 10 gallons (Cherry Bourbon Stout and a Trippel) and racked another 25 or so to secondaries (Pumpkin Ale, Rasion Detra and a Red). All of them smelled decent, looking forward to drinking them.
I’ve returned from the various vacations. Chris and I just got back from Kansas City for some baseball games. We had a good time, and talked about Brew Manager and our plans for it.
Tonight I plan to get reaquannted and figure out where I’ve left off and what I want to pickup next. I’ll start working on the navigation tabs and whatnot I beleive.
In other news I found a hop plant that I didn’t realize we had, good news and now I have to figure out what kind it is. Should be ready to harvest in the next month or so.
Starting to think about brew manager again. We had a brew at my house on Friday, 55 gallons of beer, with most of it ending up in my basement for fermenting. Chris has gotten me a logo and a preliminary layout. Both will get revised some more but it’s something to start coding a view to so that is exciting. I hope to get some work done this week and next, then its back to school at the end of August. This will probably take some time away from Brew Manager but not too much hopefully.
But you know, beer, and pictures of it. Things in my basement are progressing well. 
Everything is from left to right.
Back: Grand Cru, Lambic and a Flanders Red
Middle: Brown Ale, Cherry Burbon Stout, Heff
Front: Urban 312 Clone, Citrus Thing.
Tonight users got inventory’s. I’m not sure why I started working on this. I added it in the account controller the other for some reason. That struck me as ugly so I moved the creation of the inventory down into the user model. I also learned what magic (err not so much magic as you know… passing a parameter) I needed to overload ActiveRecords constructor. Seems harder than it should have been, but I probably wasn’t looking in the right place (google didn’t turn up anything too revealing, should have put Buck on it, mad google skills that one.). If anyone is ever looking for it you want to do:
def initialize(params = {}) #Not def initialize()
super(params)
....
end
So anyway, users now compose inventories. Life is good for them. Still can’t enter recipies, because you know I got side tracked. But eh that’s how it goes.
I’ve got beer to rack & bottle (heff into bottles and racking a brown to secondaries) tomorrow night so I won’t get to work on the site for a day or two. When I get back to it I’ll finish up the recipe stuff and get it out there.
This will be the development blog for Brew Manager. Eventually it will do all the stuff it says it does on the front page. For now I’ve gotten hosting setup and the domain name registered. I’m pretty sure I got a rails app created on godaddy.com. We will see how that works out as the internets don’t have great things to say about people success rate.
Like I said above, its going to be a rails site. I started playing with Ruby about a year ago. I took a rails seminar at school (I’m working on my masters) and thought “eh, what the heck”. It will run of mysql and whatever webserver godaddy puts in front of it. If someone other than me ever uses this… well we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
I’ve been home brewing for about a year now and this seemed like a good idea. There are a lot of tools out there that do some, and possibly all of what I’m anticipating putting on Brew Sessions. I’m not saying those tools are bad (I use a few of em), but for the most part they don’t meet my needs. This is aimed primarily at making me happy, but if you have a feature request feel free to drop me a line (josh at brewmanager.com) and I’ll consider it.
Here’s the feature list in case I get rid of it.