In the pursuit of greatness, there are bound to be bumps in the road. As the movie National Treasure puts it, which is itself paraphrasing Thomas Edison, “I didn’t fail, I found 2,000 ways how not to make a light bulb; I only need to find one way to make it work.” In that spirit, there were some bumps in the road to be expected as I developed and tested brew-bot. After all, the only way to know if my code works was to test it, and, as a career programmer, there’s no better place to test than in production.

So, this is the first recipe we committed to making from brew-bot’s infinite wisdom. I know what you’re thinking, “Why is this beer called the Mark 2 is it’s the first one you made?” Well, the short answer is that we like our local brew shop, and don’t want Dave, the owner, to hate us. The long answer is self-explanatory if you see the original recipe, which I’ve lovingly called, Will This Stupid Thing Fucking Print Out A Recipe For Once:

• Grains
  • 0.75 lbs Belgian Wheat Malt
  • 0.25 lbs Chocolate Malt
  • 0.5 lbs Rye Malt
  • 1.0 lbs Crystal 120L
  • 1.25 lbs Crystal 40L
  • 0.5 lbs Roasted Barley
  • 0.75 lbs Crystal 30L
  • 0.75 lbs Munich Malt
  • 1.75 lbs 6-Row
  • 1.25 lbs 2-Row
  • 1.0 lbs Torrefied Barley
  • 1.0 lbs Acidulated Malt
• Yeast
  • White Labs WLP099 – Super High Gravity Ale
• Hops (This was before boil times were introduced in the console app)
  • 0.25 oz Mosaic
  • 0.25 oz Nugget
  • 1.0 oz Willamette
  • 0.25 oz Santium
  • 0.5 oz Chinook
  • 0.75 oz Vanguard

Since we didn’t want Dave to have to ring up and potentially order some of the insanity above, we decided to call it a unit test and delay the integration test. I spent a few more hours behind the keyboard and added some basic guard rails, namely a limiter to prevent it from selecting arbitrary numbers of ingredients. In hindsight, I should’ve thought of that earlier, but I didn’t. With the new feature ready for testing, I spat out another recipe:

• Grains
  • 3.25 lbs Munich Malt
  • 4.0 lbs Crystal 60L
  • 0.75 lbs Rice Hulls
  • 0.75 lbs Crystal 10L
  • 3.5 lbs Flaked Barley
• Extract
  • 6.6 lbs Rye Liquid Extract
• Yeast
  • White Labs WLP099 – Super High Gravity Ale
• Hops (Again, I was still arbitrarily deciding boil times for these)
  • 0.25 oz Nugget
  • 1.0 oz Amarillo
  • 1.5 oz Crystal
  • 0.75 oz Galena

Unwilling to join me for a full-bore test, Dariusz highly recommended that I scale the recipe down to 1 gallon. I reluctantly agreed; however, this did require us to purchase a much smaller kettle to add to our brewing arsenal. However, this came with some downsides. To keep our grain bag from touching the bottom of the kettle and possibly burning, I had to tie it up fairly high and baste the grain like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Basting the grain bag.

Context: This is a 1 gallon recipe made by @Brainlessmunkey's #brewbot. Post to come.

We bought a smaller pot for the 1 gal experimental batches – should be fun! pic.twitter.com/zPMHy71dmx

— Wall Brewing Co. (@WallBrew) September 7, 2019

The brew was than relegated to one of our much smaller vessels, and left to force an unholy amount of CO2 through a makeshift airlock. It was forceful enough that many of the leftover hops forced their way up the tube and into a water reservoir. It was summarily bottled as we slowly waited for carbonation.