Feature Requests Archive A

[rrosa]

I've read and I've also noticed that the utilization factor is greatly influenced by whether the hops are added in a hop bag or not. It would be nice to see this accounted for. Also, when I was using beertools.pro I used to select three different hop utilizations (Daniels, Mosher, and Tinseth) and have the software calculate the average of them, and I would go for that. In BeerTools Pro I have to choose just one (of course I could try to customize an average one but this would be kind of painful).

[jctull]

I'm not sure why I put this in a bug-related thread. I guess I was trying to hijack, but not intentionally. Anyway, these were some thoughts on water handling and integration:

A couple things I would like with the water, besides the volume of water adjusting based on changes in the recipe, would be:

1) Have a breakdown of the total weight of your mineral additions based on the separate water components in the recipe (i.e., mash water volumes for each infusion step, sparge water).

2) The ability to exclude mineral additions in the mash portion of the schedule. This allows me to add minerals only to the boil water.

3) The ability to lock the mineral ppm so that changes to the recipe result in changes to the mineral additions.

[just-cj]

I normally design my recipes with percents in mind -- 80% Maris Otter, 10% Munich, 5% Caramunich, 5% Aromatic, for example. Maybe I missed it, but how can I do that in BTP? If it's not doable, is it possible to include that in a future update?

[billvelek]

It occurs to me that an easy way to accomplish what you want per your last post, cj, is to create your recipe like this:
8 pounds Maris Otter
1 pound Munich
.5 pounds Caramunich
.5 pounds Aromatic
... and then 'scale' your recipe until you have the quantity correct for one of the ingredients, e.g., the Maris Otter, and then unclick scale and raise your final kettle volume to the appropriate amount, and then lock it. I just tried it and it seems to work ... unless I'm missing something.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

[jeff]

It occurs to me that an easy way to accomplish what you want per your last post, cj, is to create your recipe like this:
8 pounds Maris Otter
1 pound Munich
.5 pounds Caramunich
.5 pounds Aromatic
... and then 'scale' your recipe until you have the quantity correct for one of the ingredients, e.g., the Maris Otter, and then unclick scale and raise your final kettle volume to the appropriate amount, and then lock it. I just tried it and it seems to work ... unless I'm missing something.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

Clever!

[just-cj]

It occurs to me that an easy way to accomplish what you want ... and then 'scale' your recipe...

Yes, clever. But, I can do that a lot easier in my existing spreadsheet. I don't think it would be really all that difficult to fit into BTP.

[Brant]

Wouldn't it be cool if we could just click the bar graph in the Proportion column, and slide the end right or left to raise/lower the percentage of that grain? Jeff is probably calling me nasty names right now.

[jeff]

Wouldn't it be cool if we could just click the bar graph in the Proportion column, and slide the end right or left to raise/lower the percentage of that grain?

How do you see it? What happens to the other ingredients to compensate for the change to the adjusted ingredient? Proportionally distributed?

[Brant]

That's what I was thinking. The amounts (in mass) of all of the other grains would remain unchanged, while the amount (in mass) of the one your sliding would go up/down accordingly. That would result in proportionally lower percentages as you increase the slidebar, and higher as you decrease it. Now I have to admit that that would not accomplish what cj was asking for, but it would accomplish something that I could make use of. I also like to think of recipes in terms of percentages, but I prefer to get the ingredients to the ballpark area by entering amounts in mass first. That lets me design the OG and color to match my volume. When I get the grains close, I'll often start tweaking the amounts of each to match the percentages I'm shooting for. That is pretty tedious: Click, type, click, click, type, etc... I was thinking that if I could tweak by dragging a slidebar (click), I could do it faster.

But all of that is probably more bells and whistles than anything else, so I couldn't put a high priority on it. I suppose you could add a "target OG" field somewhere, and then add a new field next to Quantity for entering the percentage of each grain line item, and accomplish what cj wants -- but you may run into problems (or at least, oddities) until all the grain is entered and the percentages finally add up to 100.

[slothrob]

Moving the sliders around would require that the others change proportionally, it seems, so that increasing one from 60% to 80% drops the others evenly to make up the difference, but keep the OG the same. Otherwise the tweaks would result in a bigger and bigger beer with each tweak. If you want to increase the OG, when done, you could use the Scale function.

The problem I see with this is that you would need to be able to lock a grain at a given %, or you would tweak one, then another, throwing off the first tweak. This would be as fiddley as adjusting the weights up-and-down to hit the desired %.

The sliders are nice, but is this easier than simply typing in the target %? I guess it would reduce the need for another data entry box, but require some fancier programming.

[billvelek]

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, preferences, and methods, so please don't think that I am criticizing anyone here. To me the idea of being able to adjust the grain bill by using the sliders might be nice, and if available I might find that I would use it occasionally; however, I would imagine that that could be one of the more difficult programming chores that we've listed for Jeff, and in the grand scheme of things, I would really have to give it a very low priority in comparison with so many other things that I think would be much more useful. For another thing, there is nothing magical about 'setting' or 'tweaking' by percentages; they might be easier for some people to remember, but units of weight are easier for me -- e.g., 7# of A, .5# of B, and .5# of C which works out in odd percentages to 87.5%, 6.2%, and 6.2% -- so it's just different strokes for different folks. As for the current setup of highlighting a grain and then using the arrow keys for tweaking, it really isn't all that tedious and I can very easily live with it.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

[slothrob]

Bill, I think there are a number of reasons people like to use percentages, though. One is that many specialty grains have recommended usage rates in percentage. Another is that many styles are defined in the literature by a target OG and the percentage of grains to be used.

I think I like your solution, for myself, though, so it's not a priority for me. Enter your percent by weight out of 10#'s, then fuss with scaling to hit your target. I have to agree, however, that this feature would be a selling point for some users.

What do we now consider the most important things to accomplish to give the program some polish?
I know documentation remains a strong issue for many.
The one thing I've seen mentioned that I would like to see is the refinement of the mash calculator that includes the effect of environmental temperature on infusion temperature.
The Fermentation tab is another feature I think is needed, and the session feature is one I know a lot of people are waiting for.

[just-cj]

But Bill, say you're using a grain that recommends not adding more than X%. I don't want to have to set up my grain bill and then tweak the numbers by hand until I'm under that X%. Sliders would be interesting, but just having a way to input percentages of each grain would be a nice start.

Really I think a lot of homebrewers would be surprised if they paid more attention to the percent of each grain. I've seen recipes with outrageously huge amounts of crystal malts or Victory malt or roasted barley -- maybe in ounces or pounds, it doesn't look so strange, but as soon as you see 35% Victory or four different crystal malts at 15% each . . . well, those are recipes I run away from -- quickly!

[slothrob]

Maybe what the community really needs is an alert that appears whenever anyone tries to enter more than 10% combined crystal malts

"Are you REALLY sure you want to do that?!?"

[billvelek]

Obviously everyone is going to have their own list of what is most important to them. I hope Jeff and Lathe also consider (and probably do) what is easiest to implement, so that they can clean much off of the list rather quickly. Working on something as presumably complicated as a 'session' feature, or 'fermentation' tab is bound to take lots of work. I've made several very simple suggestions that I'm confident would take very little programming effort, yet help to polish the program a lot. Here is a short list:

1. Since I _NEVER_ lager, and I think most homebrewers don't because we lack the equipment, I'd like to see a selection button in the 'General' section that would allow users to choose main categories; i.e., 'ales', 'lagers'. and 'all'. That way I won't waste my time looking at beer styles that I'll never brew.

2. A simple 'text' comment field at the top (general section where there is plenty of room) where I could put my batch number or comment to myself like -- 'good', 'great', 'not bitter enough', etc.

3. A 'cancel' button when a person inadvertently clicks on the 'Red-X' to close BTP; currently, you can only close it or start a new session, rather than back out of the close function.

I think all of the above should be easy to accomplish, but then again I'm not a programmer. I just think that Jeff and Lathe MUST be overwhelmed with suggestions and requests at this point. Because the 'feature requests' thread is so long and diverse, I've posted most of mine in separate threads which helps concentrate discussion of those ideas and also forms sort of a list. I figure that I'll eventually go back through all of my suggestions and take another stab at resurrecting them ... after Jeff and Lathe seem to have addressed what they consider most important.

Cheers.

Bill Velek