At last your kit beer is worth more than... well, nothing. When the game was originally conceived beer kits were the first level where every player started. You had to earn your way to the garage brewery by brewing a certain number of kit beers and drinking them all yourself. Early game testing proved that there was almost nothing fun about this level and although it did give players a chance to become familiar with brewing it did nothing to get people to play together. So the whole idea was just scrapped and all players from the beta test forward began their brewing career in the garage. The kit nevertheless hung around and I touted it as sort of a brewing 'practice' area. But since you can't change the kit recipe it really amounted to a whole lot of worthlessness in the game. While in real life there are some mighty fine kit beers being created and this game just didn't do them justice.

So now this update doesn't make kit brews great, it really doesn't and you would all be calling me a liar if I tried to say so. But kit brews are no longer completely worthless after today. Kit brews can now be sold to other players at a cost of $1 beer buck... and the brewer gets $1 brew dollar. Kit beers are not going to show up in the beer pulldown list however (except your own), the only way to find them is to click on a player's name in the pub and see if they have any available for sale. So basically they can only be drunk in the pub. You can still drink your own kit beers anywhere for free just like before, you don't pay or earn anything for drinking your own.

Some of you are going to say that this is a pretty lame update and kit beers are still essentially worthless. Well, if you are an established game brewer then I would agree that you won't find a hot new revenue source here and that's a fact. But for players who are just starting out they have been forced in the past to sit around in the pub with nothing to offer, no beer to sell, while they wait for another batch to finish... and this can feel like forever when starting out. This update not only gives these new players something to do but they can earn a little scratch for the effort.

So why would you ever want to buy a kit beer? Well, I confess also that I haven't built in much of an incentive for them. Kit beers have no limits, they do not earn you raffle tickets, they take just as long to drink, and they don't actually add anything to your core stats. So to answer the question I will simply say that if you see a struggling young brewer who is trying to make a living selling his home brew from a kit... well then what kind of a heartless bastard would not cough up a buck or two to give them a leg up? I think most of us playing this game are decent folks and will do just that. If I am wrong well then I'll relook at incentives later.

Also in today's patch are some internal bug fixes and adjustments that will hopefully be transparent to most players.

Brew beer... Drink Beer... Play!

-Robc