BrewMate Bot: Home Brewing Recipes

You decided to brew beer at home, opened five recipes, and got five different systems of measurement. Malt in kilograms, hops in grams, bitterness in IBU, gravity in points. It is easy to get lost. BrewMate Bot is tied to a site where home brewers share recipes and calculate batches.

In its greeting, the bot calls itself the bot of the BrewMate site. It covers beer recipes and more. 🍺

What BrewMate is

BrewMate Rus is known among Russian-speaking brewers as a free recipe calculator. It works out the original and final gravity, color, bitterness, strength, and other parameters of the future beer.

The project's site has a recipe base organized by style, a rated list of popular recipes, brewing articles, and an online calculator where you can change the batch size and the other ingredients rescale.

The bot's commands

• /start. Getting started and a greeting.
• /help. A hint about what it can do.
• /donat. Support for the project: the way readers help the site.

Besides the bot, the project has a channel and a brewers' chat. Their links are listed in the bot's profile.

Reading a beer recipe

A good recipe answers several questions. If one goes unanswered, brewing the batch gets harder.

1. Style and volume. What beer you will get and how many liters.
2. Grain bill. A list of malts with the mass of each.
3. Hops. Variety, mass, and the time of addition to the boil.
4. Yeast. The strain and fermentation temperature.
5. Mash. Temperature rests and the time of each.
6. Gravity, bitterness, color. Control figures for checking the result.

Why you need to rescale recipes

The same recipe gives different results for different people. Equipment, boil-off losses, and mash efficiency all change the outcome. That is why recipes get adjusted to your own system.

A calculator exists for this: you enter the batch size and equipment parameters, and it recalculates the rest.

Another plus of a calculator: it suggests a style from the resulting parameters. You can build a recipe from scratch, see which style it resembles, and then decide what to tweak. That teaches faster than books alone.

Your first batch: no heroics

A beginner should start with a simple style and a proven recipe. The main rule is cleanliness. Everything that touches cooled wort must be washed and sanitized.

Watch fermentation temperature and keep a brew log: record the date, grain weight, gravity before and after, and your tasting notes. After a couple of batches you will see what actually shapes the flavor. 📝

Do not rush the bottling. Beer needs time to condition after filling, and containers must hold pressure. Otherwise a celebration turns into a puddle on the floor.

Age and responsibility

The topic involves alcohol, so the material is for adults only. Rules on producing and selling alcohol differ by country, and the brewer is responsible for following them.

Homebrew is still alcohol. Drink in moderation and never drive afterward.