After a several year hiatus, I started homebrewing again this past summer. I had some of my old equipment, but to keep things simple and small, I picked up a couple of Mr. Beer starter kits to help me get re-started. You can make great beer with Mr. Beer, and what I like most is the small 2 gallon fermenters. You’re not limited to just the Mr. Beer refills and recipes. Any 2-2.5 gallon extract or all grain recipe will work. You can even split a 5 gallon recipe between the two fermenters.
If you’re just getting started with homebrewing, you may be interested in tweaking or creating your own recipes. There are a few great pieces of software out there for homebrewing, but some of them can come across as overkill if you’re just wanting to plan out a simple recipe. QBrew is a great simple piece of software for basic recipe creation. It doesn’t appear to be under active development anymore, but it still works great to get the job done.
When I started homebrewing about 14 years ago, one resource that really helped me was the Screwy Brewer. Screwy was very active on the Mr. Beer Community Forum and also had a blog with many helpful posts and tools. He put great effort into providing an upgraded ingredient database for QBrew, and while it hasn’t been updated since 2014, it’s still proves useful.
I wanted to mess around with a recipe idea using some of the Mr. Beer ingredients, so I installed QBrew and went to download Screwy’s updated database but discovered it’s no longer hosted properly. I was able to use the Internet Archive to download a copy of the database, and I wanted to make it available here as well. Full credit goes to the Screwy Brewer.