Homebrew

Homebrew, built here

These are the things a homebrew practice produced over a few years of brewing in Wellington: a journal that holds every batch, the software that runs a competition weekend, sites for a club and for an annual competition, and a course that trains the club's judges. All of them are in use, and most of them share one content model and one design, which is what this page is about.

What is here

The brewing journal
The journal holds every batch brewed since 2020, over 150 brews and their recipes, and each one is cross-linked to pages for its hops, yeast and fermentables, so a hop can be followed through every beer it went into. A compare tool sets a recipe beside the batches made from it, the brew day sheets are there to print, and the guides are written from what happened in the kettle rather than from the textbook. brews.traineffect.co.nz
The brewing journal on a desktop and a phone: a list of brews with style, hops, yeast, gravity and date, a sidebar counting brews, recipes, brewers, hops and yeast.
The brewing notebook
A coil-bound A4 book set up in the browser in your name and colour: a spread for every batch, your water, your year. Printed to order and posted anywhere, or the whole book as a PDF at no cost. notebook.traineffect.co.nz
The notebook builder on a desktop and a phone: the steps, the form and the book set live beside it.
OpenBrew
OpenBrew is software for running a homebrew competition judged to the BJCP guidelines. It takes a competition from setup and entries through check-in, flight assignment, scoring and best of show to the published results, and each of those phases is one screen with its status and its next action on it. It has been running real competitions since July 2026. openbrew.nz
OpenBrew on a desktop and a phone: the competition software's front page.
Valley Brewer
Valley Brewer is the Lower Hutt homebrew club's site, with the members' brews and the club's events, member accounts, a recipe library that imports BeerXML, and a members' notebook page. Its hop blender compares the aroma profiles of hops, weights a blend of them, and finds the hops nearest to a character described in words, with the club's real brews as the evidence. Try the hop blendervalleybrewer.nz
The Valley Brewer club site on a desktop and a phone.
Learn Valley Brewer
Learn Valley Brewer is the club's judge training, a course through the BJCP style families with the notes to read before a session, questions to find out what stuck, and sessions run together as a group, so a member can go from tasting beer to judging it with a scoresheet in hand. It is for members, with a facilitator's view for whoever is running the session. learn.valleybrewer.nz
Learn Valley Brewer on a desktop and a phone: the judge training course's front page.
Euroclash
Euroclash is an annual competition for European beer styles, held in Wellington each year since 2024, with 38 entries in 2025 and 52 in 2026 across eight styles. The site publishes the results, the judges and the sponsors for each year, so the competition's history stays readable long after the weekend. euroclash.nz
The Euroclash competition site on a desktop and a phone.

The journal's brew day sheets, a batch sheet, a checklist, a water card and a tasting sheet, are on its printables page at no cost.

How they fit together

A beer starts as a recipe in the journal or in the club's library, gets brewed and logged, and the same recipe moves between the two sites without being typed in again. The club's members train as judges on Learn Valley Brewer, then judge the club's own beers and the entries at Euroclash, which runs on OpenBrew from the first entry to the published results. Each site does one part of a brewing year, and together they are the record of a community that brews, judges and competes.

Underneath them is one body of brewing knowledge, Brew Assistant, that the journal's guides, the club's pages and the judge training all draw on, so a fact about a hop or a yeast is corrected once and is right everywhere.

The club's companion app puts the recipe builder, the brew day timers and the calculators on the phone, offline, with the same login as the club site, so a member can plan at the kitchen table and brew in the shed without a laptop beside the kettle. It is built within the club.

For another club or competition

The same stack builds a site for a club, a competition or a brewery, with a brew log, a members' area, an events calendar and results by year, and the web service covers how a build runs and how it is priced. A competition that wants the judging and the results without a site of its own can run on OpenBrew from entry to results.

Get in touch.

Running a club or a competition? Outline what it needs and roughly when. Expect questions, then a fixed price against an agreed scope.

[email protected]+64 21 184 1960