Old school homebrewing is a complicated process that involves following precise instructions. The problem with writing down recipes on paper is that you can spill beer on them and make them unreadable.
This was (for real) one of the reasons Steven Edwards set out to make Brew Cloud, an app that lets you create, store and access your favorite beer recipes in the cloud.
Edwards is president of Avocado Toast Co., a Noblesville, Indiana-based design and development shop that created Brew Cloud. Edwards is one of the 1.1 million homebrewers in the U.S., and noticed a lack of full featured apps that would help him create his beer.
Released at the tail end of this past summer, Brew Cloud lets you identify the style of beer you want to make, list the ingredients, figure out your gravity, calculate your alcohol percentage and more from your phone. You can also play around with the recipe to see different outcomes from various tweaks.
Right now the app is limited to creating and saving your own recipes. There are no pre-set recipes baked into the app, and there are no ways to share recipes with other app users. Edwards said that their plan is to release a sharing feature sometime next year.
Brew Cloud isn’t the only app to help hop-heads with their homebrewing. BeerSmith is, according to Edwards, the de facto homebrewing app. While they are full featured, BeerSmith charges $7.99 in the app store and Edwards believes that the Brew Cloud offers a fresher user experience. That said, there are other competitors such as Fermenticus Brew Log and Brew Pal.
Brew Cloud is bootstrapped and currently available for free for iOS and Android devices. Edwards says they have roughly 300 users and 80 monthly active users. While Edwards has big plans for the app including an advertising option, he’s not in any hurry to scale too quickly and wants to grow organically.
Hopefully Edwards isn’t jotting his Brew Cloud plans down on paper where beer could spill all over them.
I can vouch for this app. I have used Beersmith, which works fine, but reminds me of something along the lines of An Excel spreadsheet. BrewCloud is extremely user friendly and has just about everything a seasoned homebrewers needs and its on your phone, which is nice when you go to your LHBS with ingredients already In a List form. I LOVE the app. Fantastic work!