OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Summer 2025 | 23 Homebrewers are a special bunch. Passionate, curious, fiercely independent… and, to be frank, sometimes quite stubborn. Anyone who’s spent time on brewing forums or in a club meeting knows the rhythm: endless questions, lively debates over tiny details, and more than a few misconceptions passed around like urban legends. It’s part of what makes the community vibrant — but it can also make it hard for new brewers to find clear, consistent advice. That’s exactly where Sam, the virtual brewing assistant developed and sponsored by Featherstone Brewery, comes in. What started as a simple experiment — a basic chat-style app where you could ask basic questions — quickly evolved into something farmore ambitious: a full brewing companion designed to guide, teach, and empower homebrewers at every stage of their craft. . WHY SAMWAS CREATED Like many brewers, I’ve always loved the passion and vibe of the homebrew community. But I also saw the same challenges play out again and again: new brewers overwhelmed by conflicting advice, recipeplanningthatdidn’t consider individual brew systems, and a lack of accessible tools for analysing and improving each batch. At first, I built Sam simply as a chatbot that could answer brewing questions. But it became clear within days that brewing is far too contextual for one-size-fits-all answers. A request for a “lager recipe,” for example, raises twenty questions: Do you mean a commercial-style pale lager? A dark lager? A German-style pils? A light American lager? What equipment do you brew on? What’s your experience level? Do you have fermentation control? So the idea grew: let’s give Sam the ability to adapt to each brewer’s unique set-up and style. Today, users can set their brew system (Grainfather, Brewzilla, BIAB, HERMS), batch size, experience level, water source, and personal preferences right inside the app. That context allows Samto tailor every recipe, technique, or troubleshoot suggestions to the individual. From this, Sam 2.0 was born. MORE THAN JUST AI CHAT A FULL BREWING COMPANION As the idea expanded, so did Sam’s capabilities. We added a Recipe Wizard that guides users step-by-step through designing beers based on style, system profiles, and user preferences. We added printing and sharing features, and began working on import/export tools for popular brewing software and fermentation trackers. Most importantly, Sam is built to be free for the homebrew community, offered in the spirit of giving back and helping more people brew well, confidently, and creatively. HELPING BREWERS LEARN, IMPROVE, AND EXPERIMENT Brewing is best when it’s hands-on and iterative — brew, taste, tweak, repeat. Sam is built to support this process by helping brewers: • Develop recipes with style accuracy and personal flair • Understand water profiles and mineral additions • Get mash schedules tailored to their equipment • Troubleshoot off-flavours and fermentation issues • Scale recipes for 20L, 30L, or 50L systems • Receive guidance adjusted for beginner, intermediate, or advanced skill levels And in time, we hope to expand further into fermentation tracking andbatch analysis. One of my personal goals is to help integrate Sam with gadgets used by the growing “tech brewer” crowd — RAPT fermentation pills, BrewZilla controllers, temperature monitors, and similar gear. Many of these manufacturers make it possible (though sometimes painfully difficult) for users to export data. I often ask brewers to send me their fermentation logs for analysis, only to get a confused reply like “I only speak English,” which sums up the gap between hardware capability and real-world usability. If Sam can bridge that gap — turning raw numbers intomeaningful brewing insights— then the whole community benefits. THE BIGGER PICTURE: AI IN BREWING Brewing will always be a craft rooted in sensory experience, creativity, and human judgement. AI isn’t here to replace that — it’s here to elevate it. Tools like Sam can grow brewing knowledge, cut through misinformation, help people plan better brew days, and encourage more experimentation without the frustration of trial-and-error guesswork. Sam learns from modern techniques, regional sourcing, and brewing literature, combining it with Featherstone Brewery’s own brewing experience to offer advice that’s both practical and grounded. At the heart of it, Sam exists to make brewing more enjoyable. To help brewers get better results, with fewer dead ends, and more moments of “wow, that worked”. Cheers — and happy brewing! Find Brewer Sam at brewer-sam.co.za WILL YELL: A WORD FROM THE CREATOR OF BREWER SAM DION VAN HUYSSTEEN: CAN AI BREW YET? TESTING BREWER SAM Sometime in early 2023, not long after the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT took the world by storm, I decided to see what this new wonder AI could do with brewing. I asked, “How about we make a recipe for a brown ale with added ginger?” Almost instantly, it confidently spat out a recipe: pale malt, crystal malt (though with no details on what kind), chocolate malt, East Kent Goldings and Fuggles hops, and some ginger. However, the instructions for mashing gave a temperature range that was 10 °C too high, and while the grain amounts looked good for a 20-litre batch of beer, it told me this would only produce nine. If I were a beginner brewer who was just following the recipe, I would have been in for a disaster of a brew day. The great ChatGPT was definitely not ready to take on homebrewing. ENTER BREWER SAM Nearlythreeyearshavepassedsincemyinitial attempt, and AI has moved forward at an amazing pace in that time. In industries such as software development, AI has changed the way we work immensely, but brewing doesn’t seem to have changed much at all. Until now… Enter Brewer Sam, developed by Will Yell from Featherstone Brewery. Promising to help create recipes, troubleshoot issues, or just answer questions — you can dive right in without even creating an account (though having an account opens other features like saving your recipes). PUTTING SAM TO THE TEST Remembering my first request to ChatGPT, I decided to test what Sam can do using the