Brewtility Blog

What's new?

Brewtility — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:33:22 GMT

Many of you may have notced that there haven't been a lot of changes to brewtility in last couple of months. Well that's because we've been concentrating on getting the brew session tracking part of the site finished up and ready for its debut.

There are a lot of great things to be on the lookout for with this upcoming update. The brew session tracking features will include:

A mash designer
Helpers to calculate water amounts for mashing and sparging
Efficiency calculator
Areas to track fermentation with optional reminders on when to transfer, bottle, etc.
A boil timer that will help you get your hop additions in at just the right time

There's no definite timeline for when this will be available so stay tuned!

Partial Boils

Brewtility — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:59:00 GMT

Along with several bug fixes and other enhancements, today's update to Brewtility includes functionality for specifying a partial boil when creating a recipe.

So, when creating a partial mash or extract recipe you'll now see a field labeled "Boil Size." (Shown below)

Setting the boil size equal to the batch size would indicate a full boil and the rest of the recipe will be unchanged. However, if you're an extract or partial mash brewer and you only boil, say, 3 gallons of liquid and then top off to 5 gallons after the boil, you'd set the Batch Size to 5 gallons and the Boil Size to 3 gallons.

So what does this really mean?

Bascially, when boiling a given amount of extract in a smaller volume of liquid, the specific gravity of the wort in the boil is much higher than if it were boiled in the full and final volume because the sugars are more conectrated. There are several effects of boiling this more concentrated wort that you need to be aware of. One effect is that there is usually more carmelization of the sugars and thus more darkening of the wort and potentially more unfermentable sugars that are created as a result. Also, hop utilization goes down as the specific gravity of the wort during the boil goes up. This is the effect that matters to us as we're formulating recipes. Since hop utilization goes down, the quantity of hops needed to attain a given number of IBU's goes up.

So, when you set your boil size to an amount less than the final batch size, you'll see the estimated IBU's go down. Once you've got your batch and boil sizes set for a recipe, you can simply increase the amount of hops until you get to the IBU number that you're shooting for.

Happy Brewing!

Convert all grain recipes to extract

Brewtility — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:18:59 GMT

A new round of updates to Brewtility brings a host of fixes, enhancements and new features. Among them is an all grain to extract converter.

This doesn't work for all recipes, but when viewing any recipe with base grains that have extract equivalents you should see a new icon (shown below.)

Clicking this icon will convert the base grains to extract equivalents and automatically adjust the amount to keep the same original gravity.

Currently this converter assumes that you're doing a full boil, so it doesn't adjust the hopping schedule at all. Eventually there will be an option for a full or partial boil and the hops can be adjusted accordingly. But this is a good step and a requested feature that should be quite useful.

Enjoy!

Brewtility now supports beerXML

Brewtility — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:25:58 GMT

With today's site update we've included support for importing and exporting of beerXML files to the beer recipe database here at Brewtility.com

With beerXML support you can now upload all of your homebrew recipes directly from your desktop brewing software packages if it supports beerXML. You can also export your recipes from Brewtility.com and use them with any desktop-based brewing software that supports beerXml.

ProMash doesn't natively support beerXML If you currently use ProMash you can use this converter on Windows to convert ProMash exports to beerXML and then upload them here.

We'll be working on a better way to import ProMash beer recipe files, but until then the converter works pretty well.

Happy Brewing!

Welcome to Brewtility.com

Brewtility — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:28:06 GMT

Welcome to Brewtility.com. We're just ramping up and about to finish the first phase of the design. In this first phase our goal is to have the best homebrew recipe formulator on the web. As part of that, we will have a recipe library where brewers can share and find recipes to brew. We also hope to begin building a community of brewers with library of knowlegde and helpful tips in the forums here.

So please Sign-Up and start brewing. We will be completing and improving the site as time goes on and the more feedback we get, the better it will be.