The Messy Forum...

[Nicholas Jones]

Does anyone else find the forum is getting quite difficult to navigate around and find the information you are looking for?? I guess the one that bugs me the most are the 'recipe advice' and 'what are you brewing threads'. One thread, many many different recipes and styles of beer.

Surely having beer styles (eg Pale ale, Amber, Golden, Stout etc etc) as categories and then posts within these would make the sharing of knowledge a little easier... and the forum a lot tidier and a more useful resource..

Im not sure if its just me, but does this forum operate differently to most or has it just evolved that way?

Well, thats my tiny rant. Anyone care to comment?? 

(Or maybe I could just start beer-style threads......)

[Andrew Dixon]

Agree completely Nicholas.

 

I've always found the forums a bit awkward here.  As you say there are a number of threads which would (in my opinion anyway) work much better as forums in themselves, eg, a recipe advice forum.

 

Andy

[JR]

Good points, but it is a fairly low volume forum. I wouldn't want to see it divided into too many "forums".  More, shorter, specific threads in the existing "HomeBrewers" area is the better option imho

[Andrew]

Alot of the people on here have been on here a while and it just kind of "evolved that way" as you said. Someone talks about what they're drinking, then someone goes,"oh sounds good, can I have that recipe" and it does end up in technically the wrong place. But I think a fresh pair of eyes is always more objective. If you've got an idea just make up some threads and put them on here. Worst case scenario is no-one will write on them and they may get deleted at some stage.

[Richard Jack]

Well, there is the Recipe Exchange. Doesn't seem to see much use.

[JoKing]

Yeah - I wouldn't bother brewing any of the recipes on the "What are you Brewing" forum. I see that is a bit of a conversation... kinda like "what are you up to this weekend?"...

 

Unless there are people updating the status of that recipe like how JT does, for all you know the beer could have turned out like crap. Then... the readers get on there and try to replicate it! Obviously not all the recipes turn out bad at all...  I know a lot of the ones I published on the "what are you brewing" turned out very average indeed - and I take no responsibility for anyone trying to replicate that!!!

 

I'd sooner get a published recipe like in "Brewing Classic Styles" as a basis and go from there... Or just brew some of Sorens recipes on here.

[jt]

turned out like crap

 

Sshhhhhh ... I wasn't going to tell

[Reviled]

I think I disagree with u there Jo, personally ive drawn heaps of inspiration from the 'what r u brewing' thread, whilst I do take everything with a grain of salt, I quite often see recipes that I either want to try myself, or that give me inspiration to try something different! Ive never referenced a book like jamils when creating a recipe, always just used this website..

I agree it can b a bit confusing at times, but once u get the hang of it finding the things u need is easy! One tip woops b to search using Google and not the realbeer search engine..

[JoKing]

Fair enough call - I agree with you actually. However for newby brewers - some of the "inspiring" recipes on "what are you brewing" might be a bit advanced of the learner brewer. And as Nick says:

 

"Surely having beer styles (eg Pale ale, Amber, Golden, Stout etc etc) as categories and then posts within these would make the sharing of knowledge a little easier... and the forum a lot tidier and a more useful resource.."

 

You can find pretty much every single style of beer as an award winning recipe in "Brewing Classic Styles"... and they all won an award in the US HBC. What better place to look for a great style recipe?

[jt]

I guess we're pretty lucky that we've had this forum set up here for us to use as a local focus point - instead of having to pick our way through an overseas forum  with lots of irrelevant stuff - or the old yahoo group - and I pick up a lot of good stuff here.

But I don't think we'd call it the be all and end all of great resources, I think most people trawl pretty widely for that yea ?

It's easy just to open up the front page an look at the latest posts.
But if you're really interested in a thread then you've got to make the effort to look for it - and there's nothing wrong with that.
There's a couple of different forum options and there's some pretty popular threads - I guess it's upto the users to post where appropriate.

As for the What Are You Brewing thread ?
Well I've picked up a lot of good tips on ingredients and combinations from there, especially like Joe says when people put follow up posts on.
And you get an idea of who brews a style you also like and you work out what'll work for you & what won't.

[Dougal]

I like the What Are You Brewing thread for its stream of consciousness style: it's really interesting to watch other brewers design and tweak recipes. I've learned a lot about using hops from that thread. It's a nice barometer of current fads too.

It would be nice to have a place for recipes that people are happy with their tweaks and want to share, maybe similar to the recipe section on AHB where you can see how many people brewed a recipe and what they thought of it.

 

[Tilt]

+1 Dougal.

I like the "collaborative conversation" that the What Are You Brewing  thread fosters.  But it is a buggar to search retrospectively if you're after something specific that you can't quite remember where it is - the best way to use it seems to be to follow the conversation as it unfolds.

The AHB Recipe DB with attached comment and tweak threads for each recipe is another way to do this - but not sure whether Ning supports that style.

I'd also agree with JR below that the most important aspect of the recipe related RB posts for me is the local NZ info - local ingredients, suppliers, techniques and innovations.

[Reviled]

Actually pretty good call about brewing classic styles, and perhaps thats why the recipe exchange never quite took off?