Search For A Free Web-Based Brewing Tool

I've decided to start brewing my own beer again. I once entertained a thought of actually brewing and selling my beer someday, but right now I'll just settle for brewing. It's been about 4 years since I seriously (seriously meaning 2 or more batches a year...which isn't that serious!) brewed, and two since I've made anything at all! But it's fun and easy to do, and I'm hoping to get back on the horse.

I decided to look for an online and free utility for brewing, and after a couple of quick searches I saw mention of Brewtility on a brewing forum. The site first came online as a place to store and share recipes as well as communicate with other brewers. It has a recipe generator (more on this later) and will soon have the ability to log brew sessions. Sounds awesome to me - I'm tired of using pencil and paper, and besides my brewing notes are so scattered, it'll be good to put them all in one spot online.

I've had a couple of glitches with it. I can't seem to upload a profile photo, and the recipe generator crapped out once on me trying to select hops for the recipe. In its defense, it auto-saved what I had done, so I didn't have to go back and rebuild the malt bill. I've emailed support about the picture (Cuz it's that cool picture of sailors drinking beer on shore leave in WWII.)

My first recipe is going to be an IPA. I made one a few years back that came out okay, but I missed my target gravity (that means I didn't have the amount of fermentable sugar I'd planned when I started fermenting and therefore came out "light" on the alcohol content). So, as best I could remember (I have the notes somewhere!) I put together the recipe on the generator and was very impressed.
Adding and subtracting ingredients is pretty intuitive. It flows well from top to bottom, and you can play with everything from mashing efficiency to the alpha acid content of the hops you select. You can also work in whatever scale/measurement system you want to use by adjusting your preferences.

The menus for recipe items (grains, extracts, hops and yeast) are pretty good, they even have "generic" liquid extract values on there, but not dry ones, which I prefer to use. Still, assuming one is like the other I could pick a DME (I used Breiss vice Coopers which I prefer). It would be nice to see a way to submit new items for consideration. The generator will even go as far to predict the final gravity, %ABV and calorie content for your beer.

So all that's left is to verify what I put in with my old notes and go from there. Once I dig up my gear, figure out what I need to replace, and buy the recipe.

All in all, I like what I see so far in Brewtility. It's not a big network - only a handful of active users - right now, but it has what I need so far until I can find a full-blown social network for actual brewers. I'll keep looking.

My Focus Has Been Elsewhere Lately

As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm in for some big transition this year, and one of the things I must do to prepare for it is to get in shape. 'Cuz I'm fairly well out of shape. It sucks because I've had a pretty good "fitness" track record. I know how to eat and exercise to get into great shape, and I've "been there". But once I started slipping a couple of years back, the slide was gradual but significant. Yeah we know, you "used to be", blah-blah-blah.

Anyway, I'm back on it. The biggest difficulty for me has been putting everything together into a cohesive plan and TRACKING PROGRESS without it taking up my whole damned day. Writing in printed workout journals, making up spreadsheets to record and generate workouts and track nutrition, it just took up too much freakin' time. Of course, that was before I found out there is a social network that helps you track all that stuff in a fraction of the time.

I found out about it when I was poking around my good friend and cousin's blog and clicked on one of his friends' blogs while going through his blogroll.

I won't go through the technical aspects of it - if you're interested in a good review, go to the link above - but I guess I should try to say something about what I think of it...

The nutrition portion of the site is telling me to eat about 300 - 700 more calories per day than I am normally used to when "on my usual program". I don't think I am going to force them down. I work on a "grazing" scheme - that is, 6 small meals a day - that gives me around 2400 calories a day, and I am comfortable with that. Also, the nutrition recommends a 40/30/30 carb/protein/fat ratio, but I run closer to a 40/40/20. Like 40/30/30, 40/40/20 works well - you end up being a little tighter on fat and more liberal with protein, and I've seen the split recommended more for a muscle-gaining diet. However you chop it up, it makes it easy to see how you're doing. Also, as long as I'm feeding regularly (every 3 hours) my body will be able to sustain a slightly greater rate of fat loss with the greater deficit.

My favorite part of the workout portion is not only that I can actually take a printout of my weight training workout to the gym, but that each printout is in effect a 3-workout record, unlike other journals I've seen where one page is one day. It's good to have several at a glance.

Okay, there. I've managed to NOT go three days without posting, and even said what I thought about something. After two days I'm feeling great. Of course that's the easy part - I'm motivated and I know my first weigh-in will be a lot less than what I weighed Monday because of the excess water and bloat that flushes out when you start regular exercise and up your water intake (I'm probably drinking about a gallon a day).

Seriously, if you're like me - you like to (and CAN) work out effectively, but haven't been able to get motivated in large part by not having the right tracking tool, give this a gander. Look for huzzah70; that'll be me.