rockbotton wrote:Is this project dead?

I was hoping it would be further developed since it allows US Measurements. It looked really great.

No, RB, it is still going full-steam ahead though all the work is being done off-forum now to accelerate the process. It's quite a massive and laborious task as we are using a spreadsheet to really make a program. The slightest but necessary change often takes many hours to incorporate. In fact, on top of all the builds you have seen here, there have been another 42 since .

Cheers,
Pat

Thanks for taking an interest rockbottom and especially for your appreciation of the time that everyone has put into this. We had a two day break this week (the first since going offline) but three builds have been done in the last two days over 16 hours and so we are now up to Build 52. The time spent is quite ridiculous really. But, the more we explore, the more necessary we see it is.

The lack of definition in existing programs is quite astounding and this is something we are totally committed to avoiding. For example, some programs say something like, "Total water needed for this brew", and the figure they use is either quite bizarre or fails to state that they have based this figure on the water volume at boiling point.

We really want the calculator figures to be accurate, logical and transparent. On top of this we want it to be the easiest and fastest universal recipe scaler available.

I'll write another post below now that will explain how we are going to approach the dreaded 'bitterness' problem .

Thanks again rb,
Pat

[center]The Tinseth Bitterness Problem[/center]

A study of stux's thread here will soon show the reader how poorly defined the Tinseth hop formula is. Stux, ianh and myself have grappled with this problem many times expecting that, out there somewhere, there must be a Tinseth formula that has no obvious flaws. There isn't.

Over the last few days I have explored this area yet again, looking at four screens, five programs and many websites.

The problem with the Tinseth formula is that it refers to, "Gravity of the boil' and 'Volume of finished beer.' Depending on how you define these two things, you will end up with widely varying figures. None of us here have been able to determine what Glen Tinseth means by these terms. All of stux's and my interpretations come out lower than the mainstream programs but match more closely the online Tinseth original calculator.

Mainstream programs are not transparent so we don't know how they have interpreted the formula. We really don't know whether they are treating gravity as original gravity, average gravity during the boil or average gravity during the time of the hop addition. As for finished beer volume, we don't know whether they are using the end of boil volume, the end of boil volume once chilled, volume into fermenter or volume into packaging. We also don't know the history - did one program start with an interpretation and did others then apply a 'fudge' factor to replicate that interpretation?

So, what are we going to do?

The Utilisaton Curve

There is a great logic to Tinseth as can be seen from the graph shown here. This curve gives us something to work from and so we are definitely going to use the essence of the Tinseth formula.

The Gravity

We believe the most logical interpretation of 'gravity of the boil' for hop utilisation is the average gravity of the boil during the time of each individual hop addition. So we will use this in our formulas.

Volume of the Finished Beer

We also believe the most logical volume to use is the end of boil volume at ambient temperature (20 C). We are certainly not going to be arrogant enough to attempt adding in a delayed chill factor to allow for hot whirl-pooling or no-chilling.

An Adjustment Factor

ProMash has something they call a 'Concentration Factor' which has a default of 1.3 and aims to determine your average gravity during the boil. This indicates it treats every addition as having the same average gravity. BeerSmith2's hop tool requires the user to input batch size (this means volume into fermenter for this program) and pre-boil volume so this is another interpretation. BeerAlchemy comes up with totally different figures again. Other programs may have copied any of the above as best as they can assuming it is a correct interpretation.

The mainstream programs set perceptions so rather than having BIABrewer.info's Tinseth interpretation being always lower than the mainstream programs, we will add in an adjustment factor. To do this will require entering many varying recipes into many different programs and looking for the 'best fit'. At present, it looks like an adjustment factor of around 1.2 will work very well.

Summary

As Glen Tinseth will tell you himself, bitterness formulas are very primitive and, in real life, often worthless. For example, the AA% marked (if marked) on the hops you buy are a guess. They are taken from a small sample of a 200 lb (91 kg) bale and after this they are stored by a wholesaler, then shipped to retailers who may or may not refrigerate, let alone freeze them until you buy them.

So, before we even get to the mathematics of bitterness, we are really in very unreliable territory. We hope the above plan will bring at least some logic into this very messy area.

We have supplied other programs (such as BeerSmith2) with our latest BIAB figures. Other programs have simply pinched them from us with no acknowledgement . We'll continue to remain transparent though in our figures in the hope that, one day, all software will match. We certainly can't see any reason why they shouldn't match. At the moment though, with brewing software, one will say 2 + 2 = 3.5 and another will say 4.7 while we are all sitting around saying, "Why don't they all equal 4?"

I hope accounting software isn't the same!

Cheers,
Pat

LOL Ian and thanks for your reply. It's always great to have someone to 'talk' to when you are dealing with this subject, let alone someone who knows how difficult the formulas are to 'visualise'.

Bitterness, even more so than 'efficiency', has certainly always been the most ridiculous area of brewing measurement to me. It's great to see that yourself,stux, sig and myself all agree on what the logic should be. It's frightening to see how some of the major programs treat this area. This morning I tested a major program to scale a recipe to identical equipment. It had identical 'mash efficiency', pre-boil volume and end of boil volume. All I changed was the kettle loss and volume into fermenter. It scaled the grain and hop bill perfectly (in other words, no changes) except for the zero minute hop addition which it increased by 20%. Figure that one out .

In the end though, I think having some sort of standard should matter. This way, recipes could be scaled, to some extent, in some sort of logical manner and new brewers would have at least some sort of base to work and guess from. Currently, there isn't even a base. For example, the BJCP doesn't even define what their IBU style guideline measurement system is based on. Is it spectrometer measurement, percieved bitterness, or some computer program's interpretation' of Rager, Garetz or Tinseth? If it is not based on a software formula, it isn't really any use unless we own a spectrometer or can share the tongue of whoever precieved the bitterness in the first place.

Despite this complete abyss of IBU information, we find every day on forums, posts saying something like, "This recipe will give you IBU's of 35.7." and no one will question this for many reasons. This, in itself, is a very complex subject however the base of it is that new brewers, quite rightly, expect figures they see written to be real and they enthusiastically pass them on.

What I think we want here on BIABrewer.info is a site where we help others make beer instead of sitting around passing on Kool Aid recipes.


Pat

Sig, that is an excellent post! I can see that cartoon being copied into an official guide here

Update

The hardest, most frustrating stuff (last, but not least, being the investigation of other programs) is finally done now. Over the last week, Sig and I have had a look at many other programs (including where possible, their code) and the bitterness and volume logic formulas we are using are very well-defined and have none of the 'logic' failures we have found in the other programs. With that last major hurdle finally behind us, we were able to do another 3.5 hour Skype today and work out how to make the conversion of external recipes simple and logical - as far as this is ever possible as external recipes nearly always lack critical data.

This last breakthrough means yet another layout change but everything from now on will just take a lot of time rather than a lot of time and head scratching. There are still many things to do. For example, the lowest priority item on our task list at present is to write a guide on how to use the new calculator. We have categorised this as of 'V High' importance, as it should be, and until that is written and site changes made, the new calculator can't be regarded as finished.

With all this time spent (and we're probably only half way there) anyone following this thread will probably expect some fantastic spreadsheet that looks brilliant and solves every brewing problem known to man. It won't. For example, some easy things to do such as individual calculation of grain potentials and extract additions are deliberately not included as the intention is to focus on basics. It will, however, be logical, fast to learn and formulate more accuratley than any other program we have found. It will also be the easiest and best scaler we have found. In other words, it will have a very strong backbone from which we will build a separate program suited to more experienced brewers. (More experienced brewers will actually really enjoy and appreciate this backbone. The versatility and accuracy will far outweigh any lack of 'extras'.)

Looking forward to sending you guys here a draft when we have things looking somewhat respectable .

Cheers,
Pat

Give us a couple of days rb and we'll give you an update.

In the meantime, anyone who is interested in testing out the calculator and providing detailed feedback, please PM me your email address.

Thanks,
Pat

Thanks PP for the positive review and to rockbotton for your patience .

Here is more of an update...

1. The name "BIABacus" (thank you stux) is sitting well with the designers. I did intend to do a poll but we think "BIABacus" is the perfect name, a name that really encompasses all that the new calculator will do. More details here.

2. As PP's post above implies,the 'BIABacus' is a very intelligent bit of brewing software. It does do a lot of things that no other software does. It is quick and easy to use and it is the only software we have found that will not 'distort' a recipe. It does many other things that other software doesn't and that we consider basic.

3. It will, on release, have no 'bells and whistles'. All concentration on the BIABacus has been devoted to providing sound, solid essentials that are unavailable elsewhere. Adding bells and whistles is the easy bit but even these will take time.

Thanks for your patience,
Pat

Hi there rb,

The work on the BIABacus is continuing on a daily basis. The BIABacus is actually getting a lot more attention and hours spent on it each day than any of us could ever hope for in our own daily lives. It pretty much has someone stroking or thinking about it 24 hours a day .

The general aim has been to give the betas a new build with at least one new major improvement or feature each week.

Lately, these features/improvements have become more macro-reliant and sigurdur has been putting all the work into this. It's a nasty and very difficult job thanks to the spreadsheet platform we are temporarily committed to.

For example, the last build included an import/export function so that if you wanted to share a recipe, instead of sending the whole BIABacus file (715KB and counting) to another brewer you could send a 10 kb file.

For some betas this is working okay, for others it works sometimes and for others it doesn't work at all depending on their OS and Excel version.

Sig wrote the other day that it is like a house of cards atm . And there are still a few things we feel are critical that we would like to add before release but these require even more macros.

So, for now, we are praying to the brewing gods that the rooms blown over in the last hurricane can be re-built and that we can add the third and final storey to the house of cards without everything falling down.

So, for now rockbottom, please keep holding your breath ,
Pat