It’s been many moons since I’ve updated anything on Hopville. I blame the old job and the quitting of the old job and the traveling all summer and the search for a new job. I’ve got excuses, see. I’ve been lax, so I thought I’d announce this update. Even though it’s small, it can have a large effect on recipe design. Previously, the default IBU calculation for Beer Calculus was based on an average of a few popular formulas. It did four calculations (Garetz, Rager, Tinseth, and the legacy Hopville calc) and averaged them together. I chose to blend a few conflicting numbers together instead of committing to a single one by default. That neutral position tended to cause some confusion among both types of brewers: those who cared which formula was in use, but didn’t know you could change it, and those who didn’t care at all. Plus, the only indication that a formula selection was being made was a subtle message “avg” near the IBU result – pretty vague about what was happening behind the scenes. Recipes now default to the Tinseth formula. Hopefully this will satisfy those who prefer this formula, and also clarify the default calculation to folks who don’t really care.
Little feature weekend
Checked off a few random things on the ever-growing TODO list for Hopville this weekend.
- Added BJCP style validation to Beer Calculus. As you work on recipes in the calculator, you’ll see warnings whenever the calculations seem to put your recipe out of bounds for the chosen beer style. These warnings can be ignored entirely, but at least the information is now available where it would be most useful.
- Added a random recipe link to the recipe navigation menu. Self-explanatory. And fun! Try it!
- Moved Beer Calculus so that it lives under the hopville.com domain at beercalculus.hopville.com. This shouldn’t have any effect on users, but it’ll help with Hopville’s “Google juice”, keep me from having to jump through hoops to maintain state between two domains, and make it more apparent that Hopville is there to support Beer Calculus. Since the calculator preceded Hopville by so many years, lots of folks don’t even know they can save their BC recipes yet!
In Search of the Real Hopville
I was traveling through Oregon this weekend and decided to take a detour to the real Hopville, a rural area in Oregon. Google Maps makes it pretty clear that Hopville is a placeless place, in that there is no town or village or landmark to speak of. But Google suggests that it does have a location, which it places along a roadside by some farmhouses. The driving directions from Eugene actually ended with the grand finale: “Turn left at Wigrich Rd, then go 75 ft.”
The location of Hopville, OR according to Google Maps
So, I had to go there, and I had to turn left at Wigrich road, and I had to go that 75 ft. How could I not? Knowing in advance that “Hopville” would amount to two Willamette Valley crop fields divided by a road, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of those two fields is for hops. Trellised fields were pretty common in the area, as I discovered with a little more exploration. I drove around for a while looking for a sign (literally, a sign) that I was in Hopville, hoping to snap some photos to use on Hopville.com. (Ever notice that the site has no logo? Well, one day soon, I hope that it will, and a snapshot with the word “Hopville” might’ve helped a bit.) But here’s the thing: I never found any sign of Hopville. But I did find, at the dead end of Wigrich Road (a right turn on Wigrich being the dead end direction), a very good sign:
Yep, I stumpled upon the very hop yard where the estimable Oregon brewery Rogue grows and processes its own hops.
I researched this a bit online after I’d returned home. Rogue never mentions Hopville in any of their literature, so I am not sure if anyone besides Google believes the place exists. But, I’m just sayin’, here’s a wider view of the Hopville map:
Rogue brands their hops using a town a few miles northwest of this area, a town called Independence. Apparently it was once the “hop capital of the world”. From Rogue’s press release:
In May of 2008, Rogue entered into a strategic alliance with heritage hop growers the Coleman family. Rogue planted 22 acres of hops and will add 20 more this fall on the former John I. Haas Alluvial Hop Farm just south of Independence. The land, at the end of Wigrich Road, is part of a historic hop farm called the Wigrich Ranch, that in the 1920s was the largest hop yard under a single trellis in the world.
Quite a coincidence considering that I was only trying to find Hopville; apparently Rogue was too. If I didn’t have Maritime Pacific as my neighborhood brewery in Seattle, I think Rogue would have to be Hopville’s official microbrewery. Maybe I should return during growing season so I can see hops on those trellises and see if Rogue wants to sponsor their “neighborhood website”. Hmm….
Current Hopville recipe count: 1554. Hey, ain’t that a beer?
