If you’ve stopped by within the past week, you might’ve noticed the top menu has become a bit shorter: the brewing section is gone! I decided it was well past time to give my homebrew posts and pages their own home: Herbal Brewing. And since my partner has an actual social life and I do not, I’ve had a number of free evenings in which to do the work.

Taglined “experimental beers with a botanical twist,” Herbal Brewing focuses on the aspect of my brewing practice that I feel has the most potential interest to other brewers. The move was motivated by my desire to make DaveBonta.com more focused on my writing and videopoetry, but I was also galvanized by my discovery that serious brewers use a data description standard called BeerXML that allows their recipes to be shared between different software systems, so I’ve started converting my recipes into it and embedding them in posts with a handy WordPress plugin designed for just that purpose. (Yes, there’s a high level of overlap between beer nerds and computer nerds.) You know me: I’m all about open source and open content.

There’s some more work to do on the site, but the basic architecture is complete, including a front-page index of herbs and spices and some descriptive text at the top of each ingredient archive page.

I’ve long wanted to make a site like this, partly for my own use as a transatlantic homebrewer — digitizing more of my recipes saves me the trouble of carrying the paper hard copies back and forth. Plus my recipes folder is absolutely chaotic, and I can barely read my own writing sometimes.

Ironically, perhaps, this separation of my brewing and writing-related content has led me to finally start treating my recipes in the same computer-forward way I treat everything else I write. It’s as if the current tagline for this re-focused author blog, “digital poet,” has a kind of prescriptive force.