My recent project is web-based homebrewing recipe calculators. These are single web pages dedicated to brewing a specific recipe, like a clone beer, or make your own recipe within a beer style. These style-focused calculators are called FlexStyle, a combination of flexible and style.
The vision is that these calculators meet a need that is in-between the complete inflexibility of printed recipes and the unlimited flexibility of brewing software like BeerSmith. The user has some control over inputs, but it is constrained to provide some guidance. These can work like templates to guide newer brewers into style-appropriate recipes.
All of the FlexStyle recipes are located on the FlexStyle home page.
The most recent additions are two clone recipes for American pale ale (BJCP 18B). The first clone is for Sierra Nevada's pale ale, an important pioneer of today's craft beer market. The second clone is based on a homebrew recipe that is reportedly from Ken Grossman's homebrewing notes. This was the predecessor of Sierra Nevada's current pale ale. It's a bit bigger than the commercial offering. It is also interesting from a historical perspective.
Gordon Strong recently wrote an article in Brew Your Own magazine about "alternative" mashing techniques. Parti-gyle brewing was an old British method for brewing two or more beers of different strengths from a single mash. A strong first running (or gyle) was combined with a weaker second running to produce an intermediate strength beer. The article describes the basic concept for calculating the blended specific gravity, but does not go into much detail.
The parti-gyle blending calculator provides two useful calculations for parti-gyle brewers. The first option can estimate the gravity of a wort created by blending two worts of different strengths. This is similar to the calculations described in Strong's article. The second option will estimate the volume of the second running needed to achieve a target specific gravity in the blended wort. The calculations from both options are explained.
https://topdownbrew.com/PartigyleBlending.html
Strong, G. (2023, September). Alternative mashing techniques: Traditions of England, Germany, and the Czech Republic. BYO, p. 30 - 39.
This blog is to document changes made to topdownbrew.com, a web site dedicated to free homebrewing calculators. This is the first post to get things rolling.
YouTuber Rob (from the internet) had me on his show Talks About Beer. We shared an Irish Red, talked about brewing, and had a good time. I t...
