A while back we told you how CraftBrew started - the garage, the first batches, the leap into building something bigger. What we didn't really tell you was who was behind it.
So this one's a bit more personal. It's the story of two people, two countries, two decades of writing software, and one shared obsession that refused to stay a hobby.
Two Brewers, Two Countries
CraftBrew doesn't live in one place. It lives in two.
One half of it runs out of Alkmaar, in the Netherlands - where the brew kettle, the hop freezer, and the webshop's beating heart all sit. The other half runs out of Linz, in Austria, where the code that powers CraftBrew.io gets written, tested, and broken and fixed again.
We're separated by about 900 kilometres and one very long drive, but connected by the same two things every single day: a code editor and a fermenter.
Twenty Years of Building Things
Between us, we've spent more than two decades as software engineers. Years of shipping software, debugging production at 2am, arguing about architecture, and learning - slowly, expensively - that the boring fundamentals are what actually matter. Measure twice. Automate the repetitive stuff. Trust data over vibes. Write it down so you can repeat it.
It turns out those are the exact same lessons that make you a better brewer.
Somewhere along the way, brewing stopped being the thing we did to unwind from engineering and became another engineering problem we couldn't put down. Why did the same recipe taste different on a different day? Why did one batch clear beautifully and the next stay hazy for weeks? What was actually happening in that fermenter?
We did what engineers do. We started measuring everything.
The Same Recipe, Two Different Beers
Here's the thing that really pulled us down the rabbit hole.
We'd brew the same recipe - same grain, same hops, same yeast — one of us in Alkmaar, the other in Linz. And the beers would come out different. Not wrong, just different. The Austrian version would often clear faster and taste rounder. The Dutch version needed coaxing.
The culprit, it turned out, was the water. Linz's hard, mineral-rich tap water behaved completely differently in the mash than the softer water up in Alkmaar. Two kitchens, two countries, two water profiles — and a perfect, infuriating natural experiment running between them.
Chasing down why — water chemistry, mash pH, fermentation temperature, the dozens of small variables that separate a good beer from a great one — is a big part of what eventually became CraftBrew.io.
Why We Built CraftBrew.io
Every serious homebrewer ends up with the same mess: recipes scrawled in notebooks, gravity readings in a phone's notes app, fermentation temps half-remembered, water calculations done on the back of an envelope and lost by the next batch.
We were tired of it. As engineers, we knew this was a solvable problem — so we built the tool we wished existed. Not a spreadsheet with a logo slapped on it, but a proper, modern, AI-first brewing platform that thinks alongside you from the first spark of an idea to the final pour.
That's CraftBrew.io - built by two engineers who brew, for brewers who want their results to be repeatable rather than lucky.
What it actually does
This is the part we've poured years of engineering into. Here's what's inside:
- Recipe Designer - design any beer from a blank page, with rock-solid calculations for gravity, ABV, colour, and bitterness updating live as you build. The maths is handled; you just brew.
- AI Brewing Copilot - an AI that genuinely understands brewing. Ask it to refine a recipe, diagnose a stuck fermentation, suggest a hop substitution, or explain why your numbers look off — and get answers grounded in real brewing science, not generic chatbot fluff.
- Brew Day Copilot - a guided, step-by-step brew day wizard that walks you through every stage in real time, so nothing gets missed and every reading gets captured while your hands are busy.
- Adaptive Fermentation Scheduler - fermentation plans that adapt to what your beer is actually doing, rather than forcing it onto a rigid fixed timeline. The schedule shifts as the data comes in.
- Fermentation Tracking & IoT monitoring - log gravity and temperature over time, and connect smart fermentation devices to stream readings straight into your batch automatically. Watch a fermentation unfold as a curve, not a guess.
- Water chemistry - build your water profile from any base, get exact salt additions, and see predicted mash pH before you've heated a single litre. (This is the one we'll never stop tinkering with - two countries, two water supplies, remember.)
- Inventory - keep track of the hops, malts, and yeast you actually have on hand, so you always know what you can brew right now.
- Community - share recipes and swap notes with other brewers who care about this stuff as much as we do.
All of it wrapped in a clean, modern interface that works on your phone next to the kettle and your laptop at the planning table. No clutter, no guesswork - just the data that makes better beer, and an AI copilot that's read more brewing science than any of us ever could.
Explore everything CraftBrew.io can do →
And Why We Built the Shop
The software solved half the problem. The other half was getting good gear and fresh ingredients without paying a fortune or waiting two weeks for a delivery to arrive damaged.
So CraftBrew.nl became the second half of the answer: a Dutch homebrew shop stocked with the things we actually use ourselves. Fresh hops kept cold. Quality malts. Yeast that's looked after. The fermentation and dispensing kit we've personally tested on our own brew days. If it's on the shelf, it's because one of us has brewed with it.
We're a genuine nano brewery, not a faceless catalogue. The beers we make - Hopposition, Hopstacle, Redaliation, Hopocrisy - get brewed on the same kind of gear we sell, using the same ingredients in the shop, planned and tracked in the same app we built. The whole thing is one loop.
The Loop That Makes It Work
This is the part we're quietly proud of. The three pieces feed each other:
- We brew real beer, and hit real problems.
- We build features into CraftBrew.io to solve those problems.
- We stock the gear and ingredients that worked, in CraftBrew.nl.
Then we brew again, and the loop turns. Everything we sell and everything we build has been through our own kettles first - in two countries, on two water supplies, under two slightly different sets of conditions. If something only works in ideal conditions, we find out fast, because our conditions are rarely ideal.
What's Next
We're still two engineers who got a little too obsessed with beer - and we like it that way. We're growing the shop's range, expanding what CraftBrew.io can do, and brewing as much as time allows between commits.
If you've read this far, you're probably one of us: someone who can't quite leave a process alone until it's dialled in. That's exactly who we build for.
Come brew with us. Browse the shop, build a recipe in the app, and if you ever want to talk water chemistry or argue about hop timing, we're brewers too - reach us on WhatsApp or by email. We always answer.
Proost, en op een goede gisting. 🍻
Shop the gear and ingredients we brew with at craftbrew.nl
Build and track your beer on CraftBrew.io
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