Bright and early Saturday morning, I joined a packed room at the NCDA for a hop growing lecture. They are still in the first few years of research, but had a wealth of knowledge to share about growing hops in the piedmont. The most important tidbit is that many things are different from growing in the Northwest and the information floating about for that region doesn’t necessarily apply.

Another motivator for attending the hop field day was to promote BrewedByUs.com. I placed a stack of business cards next to the sign in sheets on the way in. On the way out, there were only a couple left on the table. Later that night, our server was stumbling from the extra load. Some quick patching to reduce database queries and add a bit more caching have resulted in a snappy site. I’m hoping the initial slow impression hasn’t turned away any potential users.

Once again there is a chill in the air. The winter brewing season is here! I’ve never been very good at keeping journals for my various hobbies. No woodworking project journal, bee journal is all voice recordings and blog posts, and brewing has previously been notes on the recipe paper. I’ve always been very good at taking notes and documenting software projects, but that is what I do for a living.

My brewing will get a bit more methodical thanks to BrewedByUs.com – a homebrewing site with recipes and journals. The site was brainstormed over pizza. Sadly, my workload prevented me from being able to help with the initial implementation, but Mark Lavin has done an amazing job laying the foundation. I’ve recently joined him to help with continued development. There are many great improvements planned and we’ve had a lot of good feedback from the many fellow homebrewers on Google Plus.

In my opinion, one of the best features of the site is its ability to track modifications to user created recipes. A pet peeve of mine with every site that has recipes is that users will highly rate a recipe, but mention that they changed almost everything about it. The BrewedByUs site will let anyone create a recipe, and anyone else can adapt the recipe to properly track those changes.

BrewedByUs.com is a Django powered site that makes use of many open source applications. Although the code for the site itself is not shared with the public, we have and will continue to contribute back to Django and the other upstream applications. The site is integrated with many other OAuth providers, so it’s fast and easy to create an account without needing to remember yet another password. Give it a spin and let me know what you think.