January 2013 release is live – Shopping List, Inventory Update, Yeast Updates

The January 2013 release is live. The My Brewing section got a lot of attention – Shopping List, Inventory Sorting, and My Brewing notes. The Recipe Editor has three new fields: target fermentation temperature, yeast pitch rate, and award winning. The Yeast Pitch Rate and Starter Calculator is more tightly integrated with the Recipe Editor, and gets a correction to the dry yeast count.

The majority of this release addresses items from the feature request forum. Fellow brewers, thank you for your input, and happy brewing!

My Brewing section updates:

• The My Inventory listing is now sortable.
• A shopping list section has been introduced that works similar to the My Inventory section. Shopping List items can be propogated to invetory using the ‘Convert To Inventory’ button at the top of the My Shopping page.
• In a future release, we will allow a recipe to be added to the shopping list (optionally accounting for what is already in inventory). That will complete the circle of ingredient tracking – from planning all the way to brew day.
• A simple My Notes section has been added that allows free form tracking of brewing ideas.

Recipe Editor updates:

• Yeast section now has target fermentation temperature, and taret yeast pitch rate. While this may seem like too much for beginning brewers, we want to put it front and center how important these concepts are to brewing excellence. The fields are not required, and all existing recipes will simply show a blank.
• A link has been added directly to the Yeast Pitch Rate and Starter Calculator. When clicking this link, details about your recipe automatically flow through so you have less info to fill out. Big time saver.
• An Awards Won field has been added to the Recipe Editor and the Search Recipes page. This way you can filter for proven recipes. The use of the checkbox is based on the honor system. We expect brewers who check this box to provide evidence of the award (normally a link to the results). To those of you who have shared award winning brews, do us a favor and check that box so something shows up in the results!!!
• Maltodextrin has been added to the fermentables drop down, and Lactose (Milk Sugar) had its name clarified. Both of these ingredients do not contribute to ABV, since they are non-fermentable sugars. They do increase FG (sweetness, mouth feel, body). The logic in the recipe editor now correctly accounts for this.

The Yeast Pitch Calculator updates:

• In doing more reading, and comparing to manufacturer’s numbers, we feel the idea that dry yeast contains 20 billion cells per gram is over stated (or at least needs a study to back it up).
• The default value is now 10, however the value can be overriden manually.
• The new default is backed up by a study Kaiser linked to us.
• Manufacturers claim only 5 or 6!
• There is more information in the dry yeast notes section of the yeast calculator.
• This release adds additional pitch rates for fine tuning.

Other notes:

• Custom Attenuation can be set up to 150% – which is well past the theoretical max.
• Logins, signups, password changes, and any account related site access is now protected by SSL for your added protection.
• Improved rendering in certain cases in Chrome when zoom level was not 100%.
• When a brew session gets deleted it will now decrement the brew count for the related recipe.
• Brew logs tied to a deleted brew session no longer appear in the dashboard.
• BeerXML logic updated to handle non-standard names of certain yeasts, out dated styles, and corner cases in the water section.
• Fixed bug in Chrome, when searching for beer recipes and hitting back, most recent search will now appear.