New Recipes

I've just uploaded some new recipes that were submitted to me (independently) by a couple of Aussie BeerAlchemy users. My thanks to Kai and John. Sterling effort you guys....thanks for help out the Pom!

If you have any recipes you'd like to contribute then please do. They must however be your own work and not straight copies of recipes published elsewhere.

BeerAlchemy 1.1.2 and the recipes page

Yesterday, we released a new version of BeerAlchemy 1.1.2. This new version includes a few things that didn't quite make it into the 1.1 release but I wanted to get out to users before the next major release. I've mentioned the features in a previous blog entry. Unless any major bugs are reported, 1.1.2 will be the last 1.1.x release as work will begin shortly on 1.2. It will consequently be a couple of months (probably) until there's another release.

Yesterday, we also uploaded a recipes area to the website. This has been requested a number of times by users so we hope it's helpful. In it's current form it is hardly an extensive collection but we hope users will contribute some of their recipes to the cause! The collection right now consists mainly of recreations of English commercial beers - albeit cunningly disguised under different names. Some brewers may be surprised to see sugar as an ingredient in a couple of the beers. My defence would be that that is what the commercial breweries in question use. Personally I wouldn't use sugar in a standard gravity bitter but that is what some breweries do. I do feel that the use of sugar is however essential to get the right level of body in some of the Belgian styles.

I would particularly like to hear from brewers with great lager recipes they wish to share. I don't brew lagers (I lack a fermentation fridge) so I haven't got any to publish on the recipes page.

What's coming next.

I'm just finishing work on the next version of BeerAlchemy. It will be a minor point release but unusually (for me at least) it actually includes some improvements and new features beyond the usual bugfixes.

So what are they?

1) Improved printing options.
2) Beer color 'swatch' in the recipe previews and exported webpages.
3) A new calculator to give advice on yeast pitching amounts for dry and liquid yeast as well as recovered slurries.

1.1.2 will be released after I've finished my testing.

After this release is out of the door I'll start working on 1.2 which will have a more extensive list of 'new stuff' as befits a major release.

A rediscovery

I was doing a brew today so I had most of the contents of the shed out whilst looking for bits of equipment. Whilst I was in there I rediscovered an old case of beer. The case was of Eldridge Pope's Thomas Hardy Ale of various vintages - the oldest a nip bottle dating from 1984! The case was originally part of a special release of mixed vintages EP put out in 1997. There were only 200 cases in the release. I guess some of the beers in this case might be the only examples in existance. The brewery itself closed after a series of disasters starting when EP thought they could do without their brewery (they couldn't) and they could beat the big pub companies at their own game (they couldn't).

I've tried the 1993 vintage and it has aged fantastically. I'm really looking forward to trying the others over the coming months.

I've also got a 1992 vintage, 250th anniversary Whitbread Ale. It's OG was 1.100 and was a limited edition. When it was released the brewery recommended saving it so you could celebrate your first born...well we haven't had one yet. Maybe if none has arrived by my 40th birthday I'll have it then. Curiously enough Whitbread as a brewer doesn't exist anymore either. It sold it's breweries and decided to throw away 250 years of heritage to run hotels and health clubs.

No soul some people eh?

Hmmm, I feel a bit stupid.

If you recently downloaded version 1.1 and have found you can't actually buy the program from within the program itself, could you please download version 1.1.1 that's uploaded now. Due to an oversight on my part, I forgot to put one critical line of code in the program. One line doesn't sound like much (especially as BeerAlchemy has over 16,000 lines) but this one line was pretty important.