StrangeBrew Brewing Software

Why StrangeBrew?

This is the random rambling story of StrangeBrew.

StrangeBrew is named after the funniest Canadian film of all time, Strange Brew, the story of Bob and Doug McKenzie, two bumbling hosers with a single purpose: obtain free beer by putting a mouse in a beer bottle and convincing the Beer Company that they got bad beer. Unfortunately they get caught up in the Beer Company's plans to rule the world via mind control, and the whole adventure descends from there.

But I digress.

I started working on StrangeBrew in 1998 to teach myself Visual Basic and to simplify the many calculations I was doing for every batch. Unfortunately, VB is unsuited to sleek, slim database applications, and my 12 meg monstrosity never made it to public consumption. In 2000 I started StrangeBrew again to teach myself C++.

In creating StrangeBrew, I wanted to design as easy to use and intuitive interface as possible, and to accommodate a wide range of brewing styles from extract only to all-grain. I believe that StrangeBrew is easy to use, although I'm always finding things that need improvement.

Some of StrangeBrew's brewing calculation code, and water treatment code, is open source. Contact me if you would like a copy of this code.

By trade I'm a technical writer, and my day job involves documenting often poorly planned and hard to use software. My first goal with StrangeBrew was to make it as easy to use as possible, without sacrificing functionality. With each release of StrangeBrew I try to improve the interface to make it a little more intuitive.

I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada's capital.

Last update: 10-Jan-2008