Sticke Alt, Australian Sparkling Ale, Leipziger Gose, Classic American Cream Ale, Imperial Lager.  What do all these beer styles have in common?  Done guessing?  Hint: They’re not in the Beer Judges Certification Program Style Guidelines.  Nor are a lot of other lesser-known beer styles.  The BJCP Style Guide is the main source of style guidelines used by home and microbrewers in the US, and beyond.  But it has its purpose, educating beer judges.  For a brewer, it’s just not quite complete.

As noted previously, we’ll be including the FULL BJCP Beer Style Guidelines in BrewSession.  However, lately, as I’ve brewed my last few batches of beer that didn’t fall into a BJCP specified style, I started thinking about those “missing styles”.

Certainly there are many, many modern and ancient styles that aren’t in the BJCP style guidelines.  Some are just too obscure, some are even commercially extinct.  But there are some styles that, still, deserve to be recognized … somehow.

Some of these obscure styles even get brief mentions in the BJCP Style Guide as part of another similar or contrasting style.  Others are mentioned in BJCP Style Category 23A which is purposely labeled a “catch-all” category of beers that don’t have their own category.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guidelines to help you brew all those styles that haven’t made it into the official BJCP Style Guide?

There are well over 20 styles that are of major interest to the home and micro-brewer that I think need to be honored with a style guideline.  So, recently I started researching and posting about several of these “missing” styles on my own blog, “Food, Beer & Buffoonery” .  I started with two varieties of German Altbier that are different enough from the standard Alt to deserve mention: Sticke Ale and Münster Alt.

I’ll be periodically adding more posts about other non-BJCP beer styles that are of interest to us brewers.  I’ll also be continually updating previous style posts as new information comes in.  With all of these, I’ll be “attempting” (with big help from many of you) to create a BJCP-like style description for each of these, so that we can eventually include these “missing styles” into BrewSession. Then, when you have the guidelines at your fingertips, you’ll be able to accurately brew that Sticke Alt, that Australian Sparkling Ale, that Leipziger Gose, that Classic American Cream Ale …

Upcoming styles in the series will include, but are not limited to: Kellerbier, Gose, Wiess, Honey Beers, Classic American Cream Ale, Czech Dark Lager, English Pale Mild, Scottish 90/-, American Stock Ale, English Strong Ale, Non-alcoholic “Beer”, Malt Liquor, Australian Sparkling Ale, Imperial/Double Red Ale, Imperial/Double Brown Ale, Imperial Lager, Imperial Pilsner, Imperial Porter, Rye IPA, Dark American Wheat/Rye.

acts_as_commentable is a nice little ruby on rails plugin. It extends your ActiveRecord classes giving them comments. We are going to use comments on all kinds of things, starting with recipes, of course. However, AAC lacks a critical feature: the ability for users to approve comments before they are displayed. In this post I am going to run through extending AAC using acts_as_state_machine.

The first thing I did (and do to all the plugins we use) was pistonize the plugin so I could hack on it without fear of getting my changes destroyed.

I start off simply here by adding two states to the Comment model: :pending and :approved.

Now we are going to write some real code, so here comes a little RSpec. aac provides three class methods:

Since it didn’t come with Test::Unit or RSpec tests I wrote up some test for these methods.

If you are confused by should all_belong_to then you should check out my previous post. With these specs out of the way we can go on to adding more new code.

Now, normally you would write one spec at a time, but I think I would bore my readers, so I combined these two. Also take note that I am using another custom RSpec matcher all_be_in_state(). It looks a lot like all_belong_to(), so I leave its implementation as an exercise to the reader (unless I can get another blog post out of it). To get these tests to pass I add a few lines of code:

I am not a method_missing kind of guy, and prefer the dynamic-method metaprogramming style. This lot of code defines class methods at runtime that find Comments in specific states. I am actually using whytheluckystiff’s metaid to hide some of the meta-junk, but I thought I should spell it out here for clarity.

Well, now we have a Comment class with two states and code to limit finds to cmments in a specific state. Right now, that is all I have. Here is the full code for the Comment class and the RSpec. You will see another custom RSpec matcher here, require_a().

–Dean

I was extending acts_as_commentable and needed a good RSpec test to check the returned objects from its finder methods belonged to the correct user. For example, Comment.find_comments_by_user( :some_user ) should all belong_to :some_user. I’ll be darned if that doesn’t look like a RSpec description. Since there is no all_belong_to matcher, I wrote one.

The matches? method takes an array of objects and goes through them with all? checking that they have a belongs_to the expected thing. Using the example above, each comment object returned by Comment.find_comments_by_user would get tested if comment.user== @user.

–Dean