Where the data comes from, and the projects behind it.
The hop facts in the builder — alpha and beta acids, total oil, cohumulone, and country of origin — come from the HopDatabase project by Kasper Andreas Rømer Grøntved. It pulls together specs that hop growers publish themselves, including Yakima Chief Hops, BarthHaas, Crosby Hops, and Hopsteiner. We use it under the MIT License.
The flavor radar — citrus, tropical fruit, stone fruit, and so on — is our own work. We'd hand-rated a core set of hops already. For the rest, we started from the growers' published aroma data and adjusted it toward how they actually describe each hop.
One honest caveat: these are estimates, not lab numbers. Hop flavor is subjective, and even the big references disagree with each other. Treat them as a solid starting point, not gospel.
Grain specifications are compiled from maltster published data.
Yeast facts — attenuation, temperature range, flocculation, type, form, and alcohol tolerance — are compiled from the producers' own published data: Escarpment Labs, White Labs, Wyeast, Fermentis/Lallemand, Imperial Yeast, Omega Yeast, and Mangrove Jack's. We reproduce only the factual specs, not the producers' written descriptions.
The “same strain, other labs” groupings and substitute suggestions are built from the homebrew community's strain-equivalence work — dmtaylor's Yeast Master chart, the suregork genome analysis, and the Mr. Malty strain chart — informed by published brewing-yeast genomics (Gallone et al., 2016).
We compiled these into our own dataset. Honest caveat: which commercial products are genetically “the same strain” is partly inference, not lab-verified identity, so treat substitutes as well-informed suggestions, not certainties.
Brewing.It runs on Next.js, React, and Firebase, plus a pile of other open-source libraries. Thanks to everyone who maintains them.