What is this?
Fermentor is a journal and community for people who ferment things. Sauerkraut, hot sauce, kombucha, miso, vinegar, kefir, sourdough, koji, tepache, cheese. Whatever you've got bubbling in a jar somewhere.
The idea is simple: make it stupidly easy to log what you're doing (snap a photo, mumble a voice note, type a messy sentence), and the app turns that into a clean, structured timeline of your experiment. Everything you log becomes part of a shared knowledge base that other fermenters can search, learn from, and build on.
The problem
Right now, tracking fermentation experiments is annoying. You either keep meticulous notes in a notebook (which you forget to update), use Obsidian or Notion (which feels like overkill and you drown in structure), or just... try to remember stuff.
And sharing? Your experiments are scattered across Discord messages, Reddit posts, and blurry photos in your camera roll. There's no good way to say "here's my complete hot sauce timeline from peppers-in-brine to bottle" and have someone actually follow along. And forget about finding that person in Denmark who tried the exact same koji rice technique you're struggling with.
How it works
Logging
You open the app, pick a project, and record an update however you want. Take a photo. Leave a voice note. Type "day 5 smells funky added more salt think the pH is around 4". The app cleans it up, extracts measurements and additions into structured fields, and adds it to your project timeline.
You keep your original voice and observations. The app just structures things so they're easy to scan and searchable. Measurements, additions, and key observations get pulled out into tagged fields you can filter and compare across entries.
Projects & Branches
Each ferment is a project with its own timeline. You can run as many as you want in parallel. When you split a batch (say, half your vinegar mother goes into a mustard) you branch the project. The new branch keeps the shared history and diverges from there. Both tracks stay connected so you can compare how they evolve.
The community
The journal is useful on its own, but the real point is building a shared body of fermentation knowledge. Every experiment you log is something someone else can learn from. Fermentor is a community as much as it is a tool.
Everything is public
Your complete timeline, photos, measurements, the full story of your experiment. Someone can follow along, learn from it, or get inspired to try their own variation. The whole point is sharing what you learn.
Comment on anything
Comments aren't just on the project as a whole. You can point to a specific entry in someone's timeline. "Hey, that color change at day 7 looks like kahm yeast to me" or "I had the same stall, try raising the temperature a couple degrees."
Find similar projects
Search isn't just keywords. Looking for "lacto-fermented stone fruit"? You'll find projects even if they used different words. Someone's "fermented plum hot sauce" or "pickled nectarines" will surface because the search understands what things are, not just what they're called. You can also browse by category (lacto, acetic, koji, alcohol, mixed) or filter by ingredient, technique, or duration.
Follow along
Follow users whose experiments interest you, or follow specific projects to get updates as new entries appear. See a feed of what the community is fermenting right now. Not algorithmically ranked, just chronological, like things should be.
What this isn't
Open source & self-hostable
Fermentor is open source. If you want to run your own instance for a local fermentation group or just because you prefer to, you can. The goal is to build a shared body of fermentation knowledge that's accessible to everyone, not to lock anyone into a platform.
Interested?
This is just an idea right now. I'll build it if enough people are interested, so if this sounds like something you'd use, your signal genuinely matters. Tell me what you'd need, what I'm missing, or what's dumb.