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I brew kind of the way I cook, trial and error, others recipies changing things as I see fit or just plan lucky sometimes.
Does anyone have a suggestion on brewing software? There seems to be a lot to choose from. Any favorites, or suggestios would help me out as I have never used any before.
Thanks

I use beersmith and love it. It's very user friendly and keeps track of mostley everything you could want. You can download a free trial at beersmith.com.

Same here. I really like Beersmith. I used the free trial of ProMash, but Beersmith seemed more intuitive to me and well worth the $25 when I finally did pay for it.

I use Brewtarget. It's free and open-source. Couldn't be happier with it. I have used Beersmith in the past, but Brewtarget does everything I need with a pretty good interface.

http://brewtarget.sourceforge.net/

I use Beersmith, but recently found a bug: if you have a recipe open and switch back and forth between metric and US imperial (which us Canadian's with are silly mix of grams, pounds, gallons, and liters tent to do), aspects of the recipe can magically change. (Brad at Beersmith confirmed that he has just discovered this, and is working on it.) Also, if you go to change your equipment setting, for example to a larger brew pot, it will sometimes change your boil volume as well (to a number it thinks is sensible for your equip.), and thus your IBUs and OG, etc. This easy to fix (just change your batch size back to what you wanted), but can cause problems if you don't notice it. For example, I did this and then "corrected" my recipe to reflect the targets I was trying to hit before realizing what had happened.

I use Promash and love it but there's some open source ones I posted here: http://hartandthistle.blogspot.com/2010 ... tware.html

I use BrewTarget. It's got a couple of small kinks, but generally works well.

beersmith here.

ProMash for me

I tried a couple open-source software when I first started Brewsta and Brewtarget, I think. I didn't like not understand what was going on (and not knowing anything about brewing I found the interfaces clumsy -might be different now). I spent a day making a spreadsheet and now a buddy and I use modified versions of that.
We've never had a problem hitting our gravities or volumes anything, so I'm pretty happy with that. If you've never done the brewing calculations by hand, I'd suggest doing this for at least a brew or two - just to make you think about how things work together and the calculations these programs do. I think it helped me.

That being said, I'll probably give Beersmith or Promash a try again at some point in the near future.

akr71 wrote:Same here. I really like Beersmith. I used the free trial of ProMash, but Beersmith seemed more intuitive to me and well worth the $25 when I finally did pay for it.

I should re-phrase that. Not so much that it was more intuitive, but more closely followed MS Windows application format. After 20+ years of being beaten over the head with Microsoft dogma, I picked it up quicker than I did ProMash - but I also spent more time trying too (because the format seemed familiar).

All Hail our supreme overlord Bill Gates.

I use Promash and love it but my Mac is older and Windows runs like crap using Parallels in OS 10.4. Gave me an excuse to dust of one of my old PCs and make a 'brewing computer'.

Going to try something in the near future, maybe start with a free-be and move up from there!!
Thanks for the comment and help.

I dont use any software, i probably should......
I found this one a while ago too, never tried it yet.

http://beertools.com/

I've used both Promash and Beersmith and although the are both great, my personal preference is Beersmith.

+1.

How is beersmith v.2?

I use it now. It does take a bit of getting used to though if you are used to 1.4v

I use BrewMate prob because it is free. Seems to work well though

I'm still on the lookout for a good "cloud" brewing software: something that I can check from work/home/friend's house/iPad/phone so that I can make tweaks to recipes when I think of them, and something that makes sharing easier than the current format. A boy can dream, right?

Hogie uses http://hopville.com/ and seems to be happy with it.

We found that the IBUs seem to end up different when you compare them with Beersmith even though they are supposedly using the same formula.

wortly wrote:Hogie uses http://hopville.com/ and seems to be happy with it.

We found that the IBUs seem to end up different when you compare them with Beersmith even though they are supposedly using the same formula.

Yeah I like Hopville, but I find it lacking features as I get more experience doing all-grain. I emailed the guy to ask about adding more in terms of mash calcs and he says it's coming eventually.

I use BeerAlchemy on both of my Macs (I sync the database using Dropbox). I use the iOS version on my iPhone which will sync (Wifi) with either Mac. Very handy to have on brew day as it's got a number of different calculators built into it as well—especially the hydrometer temp. correction calc.

It's not truly a "cloud" solution but it's the best solution I've found for myself yet.

jeffsmith wrote:I use BeerAlchemy on both of my Macs (I sync the database using Dropbox). I use the iOS version on my iPhone which will sync (Wifi) with either Mac. Very handy to have on brew day as it's got a number of different calculators built into it as well—especially the hydrometer temp. correction calc.

It's not truly a "cloud" solution but it's the best solution I've found for myself yet.

I was interested in that one, but I need something that works on Windows (Work and school). Maybe next spring/summer I'll have to just bite the bullet and build it myself. Famous last words I suppose.

I tried BrewBlogger out quite a while back. Not a bad piece of software (though not the nicest looking either). Might fit your needs.