Shedding Some Light on BeerEnthusiasts

BeerEnthusiasts is a place for home brewers to upload, store and share their recipes along with search for new recipes to brew. This site was started to fill a need of ours. Tristan, Jordan and I are novice homebrewers and we were starting to make modifications to some beer ingredient kits. However, we quickly realized the short comings of the current work flow we were using. We had notebooks that we would write down our recipes. Then we would type up the recipes and post them to various places to share them with each other. We quickly realized that this solution was a lot of hassle. Sometimes we would forget to post a recipe and we thought there had to be a better way. We started looking around at other solutions and found out that most of the software based solutions had their pitfalls. Some were too expensive, too complex or just wouldn’t let us share recipes so they just didn’t work for us. Since the three of us were software developers we decided to help rectify this situation and that is when the idea for BeerEnthusiasts was born.

BeerEnthusiasts is meant to be a tool to help individual brewers but also the home brewing community as a whole. When you enter your recipe into the site it is shared with all other users. They are able to review, comment, rate and even brew your recipe. Not only does the site allow storing your recipes, but it also can be used to perform calculations associated with brewing beer such as IBUs and ABV. Another nice feature of the site will be the ability to have a history of your brewing. Each user has a brew queue. This is a list of all past beer the user has brewed along with any recipes they want to brew in the future. Since all recipes are available on the site, a brewer can search for a type of recipe or ingredient and view any recipes of that type or brewed with a specific ingredient. After finding a suitable recipe the brewer can then add that to their brew queue for future brewing. Along with the brew queue there will be list of any recipes that the user has entered into the site.

Sharing is a core component of BeerEnthusiasts, not only at the user level with the sharing of recipes but also from the technical aspect of the site. The whole site of BeerEnthusiasts is open source and available on GitHub. We are using open source tools to build the site as well.  It is being written in Nitrogen, an Erlang based web-framework and uses CouchDB for recipe storage. All recipes will be uploaded and the user will have their recipes licensed under a Creative Commons license. I will talk more about the Creative Commons license and the benefits in a later post.