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Open Source Craft Brewery

71 points| innoying | 11 years ago |twbrewing.com

22 comments

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jbondeson|11 years ago

As homebrewer I love the idea, but unfortunately other than the Schottky Pumpkin Ale, it's not very "open source" as they do not list percentages or quantities on any of the grains they use. Even the Schottky doesn't mention the batch size -- though you can reverse engineer it given the gravity but you have to assume the efficiency.

Hopefully they go ahead and release more details on the other brews and make it fully open source.

ohfunkyeah|11 years ago

One the of co-founders here (George). I totally agree with you here. One of the challenges we have is just the pure amount of information a real business has and the realities of getting that information shared. We piloted most of the beers on a custom built 15 gallon system and in the future many new beers maybe be "designed" on the bigger 15bbl system. The 15 gallon system is bigger than most homebrewers use and going bidirectional from 5 gallon to 15 bbl is a bit more complicated than just linearly scaling the recipes. I would like to add a feature to the website that lets you choose the batch size but just need to find the time to do it! Long story short we are still committed to being open source and feel free to keep us honest on that front. If there are particular things you interested in please don't hesitate to contact us directly.

kevinmchugh|11 years ago

Yup. This is like getting an `ls -R` from a source code directory and someone calling that open source. In the case of the Pumpkin ale we're also given an obfuscated binary.

I think SKA used to release all their recipes, but their website obscures them and wants me to sign up for a mailing list.

llamataboot|11 years ago

I was hoping it was going to be a fully open sourced start up. Be able to see the books, invoices/purchase orders, etc etc. But the beer recipes would be a great start!

ohfunkyeah|11 years ago

Co-Founder George Kellerman here. I lurk on hackernews a fair amount (technically through hackurls.com) and just saw this post so that was pretty cool. At the moment the majority of our "open sourceness" is provided in the deep dive blog posts that we do http://twbrewing.com/blog. We have a lot of work ahead of us to be truly open but we do have a couple special projects in the works to help that happen.

craigching|11 years ago

Excellent, you're open for business and I'm in the area :) I am a hacker and an ex-homebrewer (but will be a homebrewer again when my kids are a bit older and assuming I have the time ;) )

I'll definitely check you guys out! We're definitely getting some good craft breweries in the Twin Cities!

yequalsx|11 years ago

Welcome to the neighborhood. I live on 9th street two blocks west of the taproom. I was at the event yesterday. I'm glad you guys decided to give downtown St. Paul a try. The taproom is great and allowing people to bring in food is a major plus. I hope you guys are in business a long time. Good luck.

debaserab2|11 years ago

Hey, wow, I just saw you guys are in the Rossmor's where that tshirt factory place used to be. I used to live right above there! I brewed my first homebrew in that apartment.

That's a great location - I will definitely have to check you guys out the next time I'm in StP. Very awesome.

deutronium|11 years ago

I always find with the clone beers I've made they're not really that similar to the actual beer.

I think there's possibly a number of reasons for this. The yeast strain used is highly important along with the fermentation temperature. The mash temperature used is also very important (and whether it's a step mash).

I'd be interested to know other people's experiences with trying to clone beers.

( As a little aside I'm working on a little opensource device for homebrewers to measure specific gravity during fermentation http://hackaday.io/project/1231-Zymeter )

imperialWicket|11 years ago

This is great, particularly based on some of the feedback in the comments. The diagrams seem differ from the recipes in a few places, I assume these are hardcoded at this stage?

Once you get things in order for batch size conversions and clean up consistency, it would be neat to support efforts within the resulting community. I'm sure these are on your radar, but things like batch challenges (where others try their hands at brewing your recipe and blind taste test) and community provided/selected batch modifications for limited runs could be a lot of fun.

I'm looking forward to more posts as you move forward.

dfrey|11 years ago

Cool, but is it free as in beer?