It’s been many moons since I’ve updated anything on Hopville. I blame the old job and the quitting of the old job and the traveling all summer and the search for a new job. I’ve got excuses, see. I’ve been lax, so I thought I’d announce this update. Even though it’s small, it can have a large effect on recipe design. Previously, the default IBU calculation for Beer Calculus was based on an average of a few popular formulas. It did four calculations (Garetz, Rager, Tinseth, and the legacy Hopville calc) and averaged them together. I chose to blend a few conflicting numbers together instead of committing to a single one. That neutral position tended to cause some confusion among both types of brewers: those who cared which formula was in use, and those who didn’t. Plus, the only indication that this was happening was a subtle message “avg” near the IBU result – pretty vague about what was happening behind the scenes. Recipes now default to the Tinseth formula. Hopefully this will satisfy those who prefer this formula, and also clarify the default calculation to folks who don’t really care.
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Little feature weekend
Checked off a few random things on the ever-growing TODO list for Hopville this weekend.
- Added BJCP style validation to Beer Calculus. As you work on recipes in the calculator, you’ll see warnings whenever the calculations seem to put your recipe out of bounds for the chosen beer style. These warnings can be ignored entirely, but at least the information is now available where it would be most useful.
- Added a random recipe link to the recipe navigation menu. Self-explanatory. And fun! Try it!
- Moved Beer Calculus so that it lives under the hopville.com domain at beercalculus.hopville.com. This shouldn’t have any effect on users, but it’ll help with Hopville’s “Google juice”, keep me from having to jump through hoops to maintain state between two domains, and make it more apparent that Hopville is there to support Beer Calculus. Since the calculator preceded Hopville by so many years, lots of folks don’t even know they can save their BC recipes yet!
Database Exposure
When I last checked in about development status, I was about to shoehorn the BJCP style information into the database. Well, consider the most recent guidelines shoehorned. They still need to be cleaned up a little bit, the textual data was a little messy, but at least the stats and descriptions are there now for easy reference. In the process of fleshing out the style pages, I also made it easier to browse recipes within the style, narrowing down to extract, all grain, or partial mash. And the relatively new search feature is an easy way to cut through the database looking for specific styles too.
In other developments:
- I finally opened up the ingredients database to the masses. Previously I was the only person who could add new ingredients into the database, so folks had to drop me an email request or list their unlisted ingredients inside the recipe notes. Now anybody can add anything right into the recipe on their own.
- To accommodate an open ingredient database, I added inline ingredient search to Beer Calculus. Now, rather than having to read through an alphabetical select box to find the malt, hop, yeast, or miscellaneous ingredient you need, you can switch on a search box and find the selection by typing a keyword or two. And if the ingredient you’re searching for can’t be found, it’s easy to add it.
- Previously all IBU results were calculated using an ages-old custom formula that combined parts of the “Daniels method” with the “Garetz method”. I’ve now updated the IBU number to be customizable to the popular formulas (Tinseth, Garetz, Rager), but I also left in the old “Hopville method” so that existing recipes keep their existing IBU value. By default, new recipes added to Hopville will calculate IBUs by averaging the three commonly used formulas, but brewers with a formula preference can customize to use that instead.
- Fixed some rounding errors introduced by the recent migration to metrics-based recipe storage, and some other bugs I introduced in the broad sweep of new changes.
Current recipe count: 675
