Over time, I will be copying recipes over to https://mybrewco.com/. MyBrewCo is, according to the site, a “free online brewing system to manage your brewing, share recipes and connect with friends.”
It looks to have promise, but I found some drawbacks as well. I have entered the Accidental IPA recipe onto the site (see that here). I could not enter my outputs from that recent brewing session. Apparently, only “Brew Jobs” can be entered and those occur on a date in the future (or that day). Also, the notes features and mashing information–for all-grain batches–is limited or missing. The xml file upload did not not work for the BeerSmith generated xml (which according to the beer xml site is xml compatible); I had to pick out the ingredients off the site’s system.
MyBrewCo.com is working on more features (see here). I am not seeing the brewing management tools such as the ability to take notes during brewing sessions that every brewer needs and there is no forum, which would seem to be necessary to “connect with friends.”
Despite these drawbacks, MyBrewCo.com does have some good features. The ingredients lists were extensive when I was posting the recipe.
Related articles
- Customer Spotlight: BeerSmith.com (getresponse.com)
Batch-22 
Hi Norm
Thanks for the write-up and great feedback. We plan on adding a forum to the site sometime soon as you’re right, the connect with friends aspect is lacking. Currently you can add your buddies to your brewery (staff) and favorite breweries (follow) but enabling discussion around technique and recipes is important.
We decided to keep recipes separate from the brewing process. This makes it easier to share recipes especially when converting between all grain and extract, plus we all have a different setup. You can create a “Brew Job” for any date, future or past and it will calculate the mashing steps for you and they’re displayed on the Brew Day page. You can also enter your actual temperature and gravity readings on the job and record notes. In a future release a job will be repeatable and you’ll be able to compare statistics over time.
I am curious regarding your experience uploading a recipe. Did the process not work at all or did you have to “repair” the recipe after we attempted to match the ingredients? A shortfall of the beerxml standard is that it doesn’t provide a common identifier for ingredients. Someone could have entered “Two Row” into the Beersmith which makes it difficult to match it up with “2-Row” that our system knows. We’re looking into improving the matching process but unfortunately users will have to repair the recipes for the time being.
Thanks for trying the system and this great blog, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Michael
(sorry for huge comment)
Hi Michael,
Thank you for the “huge comment.” Good to know about the “Brew Day” and the reason for the separation of recipe and batch. Knowing about the back dating, allows brewers to put those brew days on the site if they are able to upload XML files with a minimum of difficulty.
The recipe upload needed a “repair” that I did not understand how to fix. I’m somewhat familiar with how databases work (rBase/MS Access–yes, I’m old 😉 ). I have transferred files from BeerSmith to BeerAlchemy and am familiar with the data management errors. BA will bring up a checklist that allows the editing of ingredients before they are accepted into the BA program. The MyBrewCo said there was an error (“The BeerXML file failed validation: The element ‘WATER’ has invalid child element ‘AMOUNT’. List of possible elements expected: ‘NAME, VERSION, CALCIUM, BICARBONATE, SULFATE, CHLORIDE, SODIUM, MAGNESIUM, PH, NOTES’. We currently only support the BeerXML format.“) but had no follow-up to that (that I could see). Am I supposed to return to BeerSmith and do what exactly? Perhaps a popup with the error message on how to do the adjustment. I’m not sure where to go after the message. Obviously, if it’s not as simple as possible to upload, participation on the site will be diminished.
If you want to discuss this more, feel free to fill out the Contact Batch-22 page and I can email/call you back. Or, we can continue here on the comment page.
Thanks for the comment and your work on the MyBrewCo site.
Cheers,
Norm