Open Source Craft Brewery | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Craft Brewery

twbrewing.com

71 pointsinnoying22 comments

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.

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.

I'd be very interested in hearing about how you secured funding for the brewhouse and the logistics that go into running a brewery startup much more so than hearing about recipe design.

It seems like the overhead to get a brewery started is incredibly high and I'd love to hear blog posts of how they were overcome much like many of the internet startups do here on HN.

The Brew Strong podcast had a series of episodes on the process of opening a brewery, including regulatory, financing, etc.

http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/Brew-Strong/Page-4

Completely understand. I think simple percentages for the grain bill would go a long way to showing the character of the beer. Personally I've never understood the desire to clone a commercial brew, but it's certainly fun to riff off of established recipes or to get some inspiration for a new brew.

Next time I'm in the MN I'll have to swing by.

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.

Definitely not what we are aiming for! Maybe think of it like 'ls -R' is the first option we support but we are working towards being much more 'ls -a'.

Open source is about more than a directory listing though, and I think that was the point of the original comment. Knowing what source files are in the repo doesn't really help consumers (and kudos if you can expand this and take customer patches as well!).

If you want to be open source (at least w.r.t. beer recipes) if you detailed the recipes and process so that, for example, someone could take the recipe tweak it a little, add a filtering step, and produce a gluten-free version of the recipe. If they could then contribute that back to you with testing, you're ahead of the game when you decide you want to try for that market. Something like that is the first point at which I'd be ok with the term open source being applied to this endeavor.

In any case, I'm going to be watching out for your beers, I hope to see one on the shelves or at a local bar (DC area) soon!

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!

Hey llamataboot, we have a bunch of things on our list to share and I promise its more than just beer recipes. A lot of it we have to work through since our business is so regulated and deals with a lot of 3rd party partners. I do appreciate you even mentioning the type of things you are interested in. I'll make sure to keep track of your feedback and see what we can do in the future to open some of those items up as well.

Mostly I'm just glad we have another brewer in the TC! Will be great to see where you all go with the transparency idea though!

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.

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!

So many great craft breweries, it's really incredible. I live walking distance to Dangerous Man, Indeed, and 612, have the day job near Fulton, make it a point to get to Steel Toe, Harriet, and Flat Earth. I wish I could get out as far as Excelsior and Lift Bridge more often. So many choices!

Make sure to introduce yourself sometime.

Steel Toe size 7 currently ranks as my favorite local brew :). I will be there!

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.

Thanks, I am going to have to start asking people for their name and internet handle/username!

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.

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 )

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.

Check out this brewery in San Diego. They list all their homebrew recipes as well. http://moderntimesbeer.com/blog/open-source-brewing

Cool, but is it free as in beer?

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