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by jbondeson 4392 days ago
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.
3 comments
ohfunkyeah 4392 days ago
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.
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debaserab2 4392 days ago
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.

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ryanhuff 4392 days ago
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

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jbondeson 4392 days ago
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.

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kevinmchugh 4392 days ago
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.

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ohfunkyeah 4392 days ago
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'.
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acomar 4392 days ago
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!

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llamataboot 4392 days ago
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!
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ohfunkyeah 4392 days ago
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.
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llamataboot 4389 days ago
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!
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