Brewing Content Suggestion From A Brewer

[Vexare]

I truly didn't know beer wasn't made entirely from hops. Good lesson, thanks! Why do beer companies focus so much on the hops then? I think I've seen too many Budweiser commercials or something to have that skewed perception on it. I did wonder why Tynan chose beer over the much simpler wine or liquor options from potatoes or berries already in the game. My Dad always made alcoholic apple cider in the basement. I remember us kids sneaking into it and getting sicker than dogs. He said that's what we got for messing with something that wasn't even drinkable.

[harpo99999]

in my limited knowledge of brewing(I have home brewed several batches), the hops are ONLY for bittering the flavour of the beer, the malted grain is the  sweet flavour supplier and both the malted grain and sugar are for the alcohol with the yeast doing the actual conversion of the sugars/malts to alcohol

[Zebulon]

in my limited knowledge of brewing(I have home brewed several batches), the hops are ONLY for bittering the flavour of the beer, the malted grain is the  sweet flavour supplier and both the malted grain and sugar are for the alcohol with the yeast doing the actual conversion of the sugars/malts to alcohol

Exactly.

Brewing is just making sterile sugar-water for yeast (a colony of single celled fungi) to colonize and ultimately convert into sugary-ethanol-water.

Beer is Barley Pop.

[Vagabond]

/signed but I'm wondering now if the Tynan's gonna add a new job or the cooks job is gonna be expanded. It would be cool if the higher skill your cook was the finer quality of alcohol they made and it would be less addicted than lets say a cook with lvl 3 skill. I'm hoping tynan includes the other types of liquid courage though and not just beer.

This could be a way to begin with skill specializations. Any cook could make certain forms of alcohol of certain quality, but they would have to specialize into brewing at skill level (10?15?20?). The other path maybe "Chef". So you have to decide if you want that colonist to specialize in brewing or making awesome meals?

Specializations should be brought to each skill in various ways. A researcher could possibly specialize in offensive, defensive, or utility fields. /shrug

Cheers,
Michael

[Tynan]

Theres actually a game design reason the game uses hops.

Barley is edible and is also a cooking ingredient. This means that if it were in the game it would have to be brewable, cookable and edible.

What is the problem, you ask? Well, now we have created an entirely new kind of optimization puzzle for the AI to solve. Without special coding, colonists might cook all the barley before touching the 3 rice. This looks dumb and is annoying. Properly solving it means writing the AI to solve an even more complex multivariate problem than they already do when choosing things to cook or eat.

It is simpler to just use hops and call them non edible. The cultural association with beer is just kind of a bonus.

[BlackLotos]

Is that problem not easly solved by the players themself? If we want Barley only for Beer, we can just uncheck it in the meal bill. As long as enough meals are around the colonists shouldn't touch the raw food so it wont get eaten as well.

[tommytom]

Sorry, but I am going to have to disagree. It makes complete sense that they could eat beer ingredients. Beer is "edible", afterall. What gets silly is when you notice your fridge is 50% full of hops and you are on "low food". Maybe that is your intention (punish for making beer or lots of it instead of food).

If it were fixed properly, you wouldn't need hops to be edible (it's just a flower). You would have apples, rice, corn, which can all be made into wine/beer and you would use hops/yeast (inedible or not very edible) as a brewing ingredient.

Anyways, it's a game and beer just got put in, so I'm sure it will get tweaked.
Doesn't ask me where you would get yeast from, but I know apples have natural yeast and you can make hard cider simply with apples. We would need apples first though.

[loc978]

Technically to make "beer" (and I'm using the term loosely here... I'm a fan of black patent malt and copious hops in real life), you can use just about any grain. American lagers just before and after the prohibition era used something like 30% corn, and now a lot of them are somewhere above 50% rice. Hell, there are some ales (again, term used loosely) made primarily of wheat. You still need the malted barley and the hops, but both can be in very low percentages.

As for the game design reasons... I'm all for letting us as players figure out what food items to put where for the purposes of cooking versus brewing. Could make things interesting if a food shortage happens and you're forced to eat your brewing supplies. Could put all of your colony's drunks into a depression spiral.

Also, this could put a variable quality on beer. More barley=higher quality... but you can brew something that's technically beer out of 90% rice and corn.

[Zebulon]

Theres actually a game design reason the game uses hops.

Barley is edible and is also a cooking ingredient. This means that if it were in the game it would have to be brewable, cookable and edible.

What is the problem, you ask? Well, now we have created an entirely new kind of optimization puzzle for the AI to solve. Without special coding, colonists might cook all the barley before touching the 3 rice. This looks dumb and is annoying. Properly solving it means writing the AI to solve an even more complex multivariate problem than they already do when choosing things to cook or eat.

It is simpler to just use hops and call them non edible. The cultural association with beer is just kind of a bonus.

Thank you for seeing and replying to this suggestion. I wonder if you'd be willing to keep this AI matter in the back of your head for a while. I will go about assembling a few possible ways alcohol production could work in a logical way.

One thing I'd point out is that brewing really is a kind of cooking. Perhaps thinking about it that way will help you decide on how to better consolidate the ideas of a "food" with a "fermentable". A fermentable is food too, but one that takes time to ferment. The beer product is really a special kind of food that has special properties.

Thank you again for the response.