Wheeler's Beer Engine

If you use Beersmith, Promash, Beer Engine, or whatever, this is the place to discuss pros, cons, tips and tricks
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JabbA

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by JabbA » Tue Sep 22, 2009 1:55 pm

Hi Graham,

Just noticed little bugette in v1.09; when printing the recipe to a browser (IE7, Firefox & Chrome on XP SP2) the bitterness units display to 13 decimal places, or is it intentional?!?

Cheers,
Jamie

garwatts

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by garwatts » Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:47 pm

JabbA wrote:Hi Graham,

Just noticed little bugette in v1.09; when printing the recipe to a browser (IE7, Firefox & Chrome on XP SP2) the bitterness units display to 13 decimal places, or is it intentional?!?

Cheers,
Jamie
You mean you can't taste the difference? :lol: :lol:

Graham

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by Graham » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:50 pm

JabbA wrote:Hi Graham,

Just noticed little bugette in v1.09; when printing the recipe to a browser (IE7, Firefox & Chrome on XP SP2) the bitterness units display to 13 decimal places, or is it intentional?!?

Cheers,
Jamie
Nope. Not meant to do that. It's been fixed and will show itself in the next release.

Thanks

JabbA

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by JabbA » Wed Sep 23, 2009 9:58 am

Oh, while you're coding Graham, the 'g' in grams in the Hop Variety table is in lower case :D

Cheers,
Jamie

garwatts

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by garwatts » Wed Sep 23, 2009 10:24 am

Graham
Another for the wish list......
Would it be possible when doing 'Recipe to browser' to have the date automatically inserted at that point?

mentaldental

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by mentaldental » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:26 am

I would like to see an attenuation tool. It's currently the only thing I still use Beersmith for.

Graham

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by Graham » Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:55 am

A "Date Printed" could be displayed. I did not fill in the date automatically, because the brewer might not brew on the day he printed it out.

What is an attenuation tool?

mentaldental

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by mentaldental » Wed Sep 23, 2009 12:22 pm

Graham wrote:What is an attenuation tool?
A tool to calculate real attenuation, apparant attenuation, and ABV from OG and FG. The one in BeerSmith also works out calories but I ignore that :lol: .

Graham

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by Graham » Wed Sep 23, 2009 12:52 pm

The hydrometer tool already does ABV. It would be no big deal to add apparent and real attenuation, although I didn't think it would be that useful. No harm in adding it though.

mentaldental

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by mentaldental » Wed Sep 23, 2009 4:14 pm

Graham wrote:It would be no big deal to add apparent and real attenuation, although I didn't think it would be that useful. No harm in adding it though.
I find it useful when trying to recreate old recipes (like the one's Ron Pattinson publishes). The brewing logs etc often give the attentuation and it is, at least, interesting to see how our modern efforts match up. It's often quite difficult to achieve as low a level of attenuation as stated in the old brew logs.

Graham

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by Graham » Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:35 pm

mentaldental wrote: I find it useful when trying to recreate old recipes (like the one's Ron Pattinson publishes). The brewing logs etc often give the attentuation and it is, at least, interesting to see how our modern efforts match up. It's often quite difficult to achieve as low a level of attenuation as stated in the old brew logs.
Well, yes it will be added, the same data is used internally anyway so there is no complication in displaying it.

One thing you have to beware of with a lot of Patto's stuff is that the final gravities given in brewer's logs were not the final gravity of the beer. Priming of beers was illegal under the strict wording of the law until 1936; it was allowed under a Customs and Excise "indulgence" before that, but, even then, mostly for stouts for the purposes of sweetening them. So for running beers the brewer dropped to the racking room at anything up to 5 degrees above final gravity so that there was still a sufficient quantity of quickly fermentable material remaining to produce condition in cask. It is still the same today. There is no point in going to the expense of priming sugars and the time and complication involved, if the same thing can be achieved by casking a day earlier. It is only home brewers that bugger about with priming. The Whitbread Gravity Book, on the other hand, you can rely on regarding of final gravity, because that is actual measurements of Whitbread's competitors beers. Original gravity you have to be wary of, in the Whitbread Gravity Book, because this is a calculated guesstimate that is not necessarily accurate.

mentaldental

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by mentaldental » Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:48 pm

Graham wrote: Well, yes it will be added, the same data is used internally anyway so there is no complication in displaying it.
Thank you very much!
Graham wrote:One thing you have to beware of with a lot of Patto's stuff is that the final gravities given in brewer's logs were not the final gravity of the beer. Priming of beers was illegal under the strict wording of the law until 1936; it was allowed under a Customs and Excise "indulgence" before that, but, even then, mostly for stouts for the purposes of sweetening them. So for running beers the brewer dropped to the racking room at anything up to 5 degrees above final gravity so that there was still a sufficient quantity of quickly fermentable material remaining to produce condition in cask. It is still the same today. There is no point in going to the expense of priming sugars and the time and complication involved, if the same thing can be achieved by casking a day earlier. It is only home brewers that bugger about with priming. The Whitbread Gravity Book, on the other hand, you can rely on regarding of final gravity, because that is actual measurements of Whitbread's competitors beers. Original gravity you have to be wary of, in the Whitbread Gravity Book, because this is a calculated guesstimate that is not necessarily accurate.
Yes I appreciate those points. Those brewers! No consideration for weirdos like use. No mash temps, no FGs....

I have started to cask my beers with a few degrees left in them and use these to condition the beer. How 19th century :wink: .

Another suggestion. I have just used the vessel guaging tool to calibrate my new fermenters and mark them up with my brew lengths. It would have been nice if I could have entered the target volume and had the dip calculated.

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inthedark
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Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by inthedark » Tue Oct 13, 2009 6:22 pm

I'm just getting started using BE and find it really useful and far less cluttered than BeerTools Pro which I'm used to. Great job, Graham =D>

A small plea for future versions - can I get a way of closing the recipe without closing the application? It's a small annoyance but once I've finished working on a recipe I have to close and re-open the app to get a blank page.

Cheers
Paul

Graham

Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by Graham » Tue Oct 13, 2009 11:52 pm

inthedark wrote:I'm just getting started using BE and find it really useful and far less cluttered than BeerTools Pro which I'm used to. Great job, Graham =D>

A small plea for future versions - can I get a way of closing the recipe without closing the application? It's a small annoyance but once I've finished working on a recipe I have to close and re-open the app to get a blank page.

Cheers
Paul
As it happens I am (sort of) working on a new version of BeerEngine. I say sort of, because I have got a bit (actually a lot) bogged down with the water calculator utility, probably because I am trying to make it too clever. Although I am well past the age or worrying about having a shiny scalp, I still have a full head of head of hair at the moment, but I have been pulling so much of it out just lately that I decided to give development a bit of a rest for sanity's sake. But I will resume soon. After the future update I am thinking about knocking it on the head and putting it out of its misery. It does not seem to be a very popular app - it has not found it's way very far outside of JBK. I have just looked at my server stats, and 76 people have downloaded it so far this month - that is 5.8 people a day.

Anyway, you want a "Clear All" button - dead easy as long as I can poke it somewhere where it cannot be hit accidentally. In the mean time, you can always repeatedly hit the delete button for the grain list and for the hops list, to remove the ingredients. Once you've done that it will return, more or less, to square one.

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inthedark
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Re: Wheeler's Beer Engine

Post by inthedark » Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:21 am

Actually a button isn't necessary - many applications have a 'close window' or similar under the File menu - you could do 'close recipe' or even have 'new recipe' which would have the effect of closing the current one.

Sorry to hear that the app isn't popular - considering the lack of decent applications which run on Linux platforms this was a welcome discovery for me.

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