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.

Last month the Beer Judges Certification Program (BJCP) released a minor update to their 2004 Style Guidelines. The new “2008 update to the 2004 style guidelines” (as it is officially called) includes some updated style parameters, changes to style descriptions, revised commericial examples for most beer styles and some significant rework to many Belgian ale styles.

In BrewSession we’re using the XML format of the BJCP style guidelines. So as soon as I saw that the 2008 updates had been released, I wanted to make sure we got those into BrewSession as soon as possible. I contacted the BJCP and found that no one was working on updating the BJCP XML. I attempted to contact the original author of the BJCP XML without success (Chris, if you’re out there, give us a hollar, I have some questions). So, I volunteered to update the BJCP XML to the 2008 version.

The BJCP describes it as a minor update, and while there aren’t any new beer styles in the 2008 update, or high level category changes, the number of revisions made to the “fine print” are fairly numerous. While tedious, comparing the 2008 styles with the 2004 XML and making the needed changes is quite interesting, as I’m getting to know the styles like I never did before. In fact, I started going through the styles on my own, buying 2-3 representatives of each style, taking some sips, and reflecting on the style guidelines. My own BJCP course! Dean’s already a certified BJCP judge, but I’m not. However, I think at the end of this I’ll be prepared to take the exam.

In addition to updating the text of the styles, I’m recommending that some elements of the XML be changed, enhanced and updated to make the BJCP Styles XML document more useful to a wider range of people and applications. I’ll be posting my proposals here shortly…

THE EXCUSES: Yes it is quiet. However, that doesn’t mean that nothing it happening. Dean and I are still chugging away on things. “Where’s the promised peek at the calculators?”, you might ask. Well, those are really close now. Seriously. Problem is, we got side tracked in other areas of development, along with the fact that we’ve both been really busy doing other things.

I know, it’s a shame. I wish I had all the time in the world to work on BrewSession™, but as with all of us, I have other work to do that actually pays money. Add to the fact that I just moved, Dean is about to move, I’m taking a few courses at the local college (just for the hell of it) and that spells….”slow progress on BrewSession”.

That being said, it looks like I won’t be so swamped with work in the coming couple months and I’ll have more home improvement projects out of the way. Yeah, I’m just full of excuses. But at least I’m being optimistic.

THE EXCITING STUFF: I’ve been working on “Session” functionality as of late. We’re really excited about the Session screen because it will not only allow you to track and record all the events and measurements during your BrewSession™, but also track everything that happens to your fermented beverage — from brew day to serving the very last pint.

Yup. Track times, temps, gravities, and add notes and more for your mash, pitching the yeast, fermentation, transfers, bottling and kegging, storage, tapping and drinking those bottles. Hey, why not tasting notes too…and why not add notes with a date stamp to track flavor changes over time. In fact, every “event” you add will have a date/time stamp. We’re trying to build in enormous flexibility, so if you can think of it, it’ll be possible (though I’m sure someone’s bound to stump us). You can even set an event before it happens and have an email reminder sent to you on the day the event is set to take place — excellent for remembering to transfer.

You’ll also be able to get a summary of these “events”, in whole or in part. You choose. The ability to accurately track and record all these parameters will allow you to closely compare the same recipe made at different times, showing you which variables changed and allow you to make better guesses on causes for differences in characteristics of the resulting beers. You’ll also be able to quickly tell how long it took you to finish off 10 gallons of that Pale Ale…

As Dean mentioned below, we’re working on some calculators that we’ll release as we complete them, since they’re still useful without the rest of the software.

I haven’t posted here yet … so my quick introduction. I’m Greg. I tend to GUI design elements, the web site, brewing calculations, ingredients databases, and a few other things. Of course there’s overlap in what we both do.

Though we can’t make any promises, we’re hoping to release the following calculators in the coming month or two:

1. Carbonation/Draft System Balancer
2. Calorie/Carb Counter
3. Yeast Pitching Rate
4. Kettle Volume
5. Dilution Calculator

Not necessarily in that order, but… To us, those look like a good cross section of functions to just get out there and start having people play with.

UPDATE (May 20) - The Calorie/Carb Counter, Dilution and Kettle volume calculators are nearing completion.  Keep on the look out!

Hi Reader,

Has it ever occured to you that your brewing software should be smart enough to figure out what type of recipe you are composing? It bothers me that I have to change this for every recipe I make. Now, with a few simple rules BrewSession will determine if you are making an all grain or an extract with specialty grain (Ew/SG) or a whatever recipe. You will be able to override that guess, because well, you’re smarter than a computer, even if you are more lazy than a computer.

This opens up the door to another little feature I’m excited about. BrewSession will present you with smart options about what extraction process corresponds to the recipe’s type. If the recipe is all grain you will get a full mash profile sheet, but for a Ew/SG there will be a simplified Extraction Details sheet. When BrewSession sees an extract recipe nothing of the sort will appear to reduce clutter and confusion. All of these nice options are controlled by the recipe type setting which you can leave up to BrewSession, or change for yourself:

BrewSession thinks this recipe is All Grain

Never mind the ugly colors and font, we will fix that.

Each time you add a grain, extract or adjunct BrewSession will check if the new fermentable alters the recipe type and updates accordingly. That makes one less thing that you have to change, getting you to brew-day faster.

–Dean

Hi reader,

When BrewSession goes live we should have an automated brew-day timeline generator! What does that mean?

Once you create a recipe there will be a link to the timeline which will analyze your recipe and try to intelligently list the steps you should take to brew it up. The boil is easiest and I have it mostly done:

1. Bring the sweet wort to a boil.
2. Add 1.5 ozs of 14.2% AA Horizon, boil for 45 minutes
3. Add 2.0 ozs of 7.5% AA East Kent Goldings, boil for 5 minutes
4. Add 1 tbs of Irish Moss boil for 10 minutes

See, wasn’t that easy? How about the post-boil?

1. Chill the wort to 60-75° F and collect in your fermenter
2. Add 3 gal sanitized water
3. Aerate the wort
4. Pitch Burton Ale Yeast into the fermenter
5. Add 2.0 ozs of 4.8% AA East Kent Goldings to the fermenter

Oooh, dry hops. Print it out, take it to the brewery if you don’t have a ‘puter right there. Mashing/Extraction is a little tricky, but given a detailed recipe I think that BrewSession can be a big help on brew day.

–Dean

On a side note, I pretty much have BrewSession back to the feature-level it was at before the crash and data loss. Took me about two months of hard work in the spare time I’m not working my real job. A big “Thank you” to my understanding wife for not grumbling (much) about the time I spend in front of my keyboard.

I am at the beginning of pulling all the recipe bits together. Like some of the older brewing software available, you will be able to track each time you brew a particular recipe. I am calling each separate time a “brew session” and each recipe can have many brew sessions.

Part of the fun in making beer is participating in competitions. The BJCP sponsors hundreds of competitions each year and has given us generous permission to use their style guidelines in BrewSession. The results from each judge can be an invaluable tool for improving your beer. Tonight I set up the relationship that will let you enter and track each score sheet you receive. Each time you brew a beer you can attach any number of score sheets to that session. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could:

• … track your recipe’s score variation over time?
• … average the scores for all your sessions?
• … view other member’s scores and recipes for the same style?
• … check out how the judge scored other member’s brews in the same competition?

I am really excited about sharing recipes with members and seeing what links we can make.

–Dean

Merry Christmas. Here’s a little javascript brewsession present.

http://ror.deanandadie.net/table.html

I was thinking about the ingredients table Greg designed. While it is good looking and we’ll definitely use it, I would rather see a very simple list to start with and give the option to have an “advanced view”. It occurred to me to let the user choose which columns they want to see. So I restarted work on BrewSession again with this prototype. It’s a work in progress, but a solid start.

–Dean