This Sunday, the 24th, is our big one year anniversary celebration party and the prize count is going to skyrocket! I will install more new stuff for the game on Friday night, including the much anticipated new styles! (Note that this article is going up a couple of days early so you have time to digest it, there will be another patch immediately after on Saturday night to start the party)

Go get yourself a beer first (this is a long article) and check out this week's goodies!

New beer styles

I promised new beer styles for this event and they are almost here! Twenty six new styles will more than double the available options for brewing virtual beer and bring the number of styles up and over the 50 mark. But there is a catch. Our regular players know that I usually add a twist when I release cool new stuff and that is true today. These styles are 'premium' which means that you have to achieve certain milestones to get them. Now before you panic, these milestones are not too onerous and many of you will have already achieved them. Each new style and the requirement to unlock it is listed below.

With the addition of these new styles, if you are eligible and have an existing label style such as a 'Belgium' and you want to change it to one of the new and more refined Belgium styles then just send me an email and at least for a limited time I will change that style for you. And not just Belgiums, this promise will hold true for any style listed above. If you own a label then I want you to be able to brew the beer style that you like to brew and not be punished because these styles were not available when you made your original selection. Also, don't get too hung up on the classifications/groupings of the styles shown above... whether they are Belgian sours or sour Belgians or sour Belgian Ales... doesn't matter, I just grouped them more or less as I went along. The engine treats each label individually as to what is required to brew it right and with the exception of Ale versus Lager it does not have any such classification or grouping system.

New Brewing Ingredients

There are about 75 new brewing ingredients in the brewing engine now. And for those of you who know this game backwards and forwards, I have thrown in another curve ball. Not all of these ingredients unlock in the usual way. All unlocks are still either while farming or while you are in the pub... but I have varied the number and types of things that cause ingredients to unlock. I am sure that before long my new secrets will be discovered... but in the mean time, Happy Hunting and Enjoy!

Changes to Brewing

Micro breweries may now add up to 3 flavors and adjuncts to their recipes and full breweries may now add up to 4 flavors and adjuncts (up from 2). The game's brewing engine has been updated and refined. More specifically, the engine is now much more particular about adjuncts and flavoring that you put into your beer and more capable of adjusting your beer quality when it finds something that doesn't belong or something missing. Of course putting any kind of souring agent into a non-sour style will cause a huge quality drop, but the engine can now much more closely discern subtle differences among all ingredient types.

I want to emphasize that this improvement to the brewing engine is the most profound change that has been done to the game since it was released last year. And one immediate consequence is that most beer styles will have an immediate drop of as much as 200 quality points that I have 'unallocated' from old existing processes and added to the new algorithm. The details are unimportant and don't worry your competitors will feel the same bite. Because quality paramaters overlap some of you may see a 200 point drop in your quality scores tomorrow and others may see almost no change. Over the next few months I will adjust all of the existing 'standard' recipes to conform to the new engine's capabilities and if you are using the right ingredients then those points will reappear in your batches. The bottom line is that as the changes are made some of your current recipes may no longer be 'good enough' to brew your old beer styles. I will keep you posted as adjustments to individual styles are made.

I have had long discussions with players about just how capable this brewing engine is of capturing the brewing process, it can't. The reality is that it barely scratches the surface of brewing and makes HUGE assumptions in the process. It would take a roomful of PhD students and several professors' lifetimes to properly model all the chemical and biological processes involved in making beer... this is just a game, and if it doesn't add to the 'fun factor' then I can't afford to include it. Nevertheless, I am proud of how closely this game engine can mimic the art of making beer and today's upgrades get us just a little bit closer.

There will be another patch on Saturday night... Clyde is designing this one with an eye toward making our anniversary celebration something spectacular. I hope you will be able to join us on Sunday when the fun is unleashed!

-Robc