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Nick Nunns

Owner, brewer (TRVE Brewing Company)

in beer, mac

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Nick Nunns. I don't make apps, sites, or anything else digital other than noise. I'm the proprietor and brewer at TRVE Brewing Company in Denver, Colorado. I love beer, heavy metal, and the conjunction of the two.

What hardware do you use?

Our brewhouse is a three barrel system from Stout Tanks and Kettles. It's a relatively small system when compared to other breweries out there but it's the most robust system we could spring for while still being able to bootstrap our launch. I'm actually really damn impressed with it so far. Our mash is pulling out at 88-92% efficiency without any optimization and the kettle gets up to a great rolling boil quickly and without any trouble.

On the fermentation side we have three jacketed fermenters, each with a dedicated glycol chiller (originally intended for draft lines), and a brite tank in our walk-in cooler (which is actually cooled by an LG air conditioner overridden with a Coolbot). Our brewhouse control panel was built by Brewmation.

As far as computer stuff goes I'm on a 15-inch, mid-2010 MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz Core i7 and 4 GB of RAM (which is really fucking anemic these days). I also use an iPhone 4 and used an iPad 2 until it was donated to the brewery as our POS system. I have a Canon S90 I use when it's too dark to use my iPhone camera, and a Nikon D60 with a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens for when I want to pretend I'm artsy. Finally there's my Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 which is a goddamn miracle for keeping track of receipts and invoices.

Everything gets tossed in a Mishka backpack from a couple of years ago. I tried to dye it black but it ended up a rad grey-blue instead.

I'm a notebook fetishist. For a while I was playing around with a bunch of different options, but I keep coming back to using Field Notes. Seasonal editions help me feel like it's a new experience while still being consistent. I'm convinced there'll never be an electronic equivalent to tracking ideas that's as intimate and personal as a pen and paper.

And what software?

  • Chrome to browse.
  • Reeder for news.
  • Sparrow for mail.
  • iCal for not forgetting.
  • Messages for talking.
  • [Echofon] for Twitter.
  • iWork for docs.
  • Omniplan for scheduling brewery operations.
  • iA Writer for writing.
  • Soulver for quick math.
  • BeerTools Pro for recipe development, which is in my experience the least painful piece of beer-related software. I really wanted to like Beer Alchemy since it's more Mac-like but its workflow is weird as hell and its ingredient database is pretty sparse.

I've had a hell of a time figuring out a way to store shit I find online. I've juggled between Gimmebar, Evernote, Pocket, and Pinterest and have yet to settle on one.

I still can't get behind all these streaming music options since they don't exactly carry a wide array of metal, so I stick to iTunes for music.

All my documents are in Dropbox.

On my iOS devices some apps I dig are Tweetbot, Calcbot, Convertbot, Instagram, Flipboard, and iA Writer. I've used Touchdraw for a lot of diagramming and to plan out our space and realized that doing CAD work with your fingers is pretty great. All of our POS stuff is run through Square.

What would be your dream setup?

Someday, I dream of having a 15 barrel system with fancy manifolds, a packaging line, and a place big enough to fit all of it.

On the computer side of things I'd love to bump this thing up to 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD, while cutting the weight down like three pounds.