Best brewing software?

Beer Recipe Design
1

What’s the best brewing software?

2

For which platform, Windows, OS X, or Linux? It also depends on what you would like to do with the software. Do you just want to formulate recipes and print them out, or are you looking for calculators, the abilty to take notes, and record keeping?

3

I could do either Mac OS or Windows. I’d like to do both recipe calculations, notes, records etc.

4

The best brewing software is the one that does what you need it to do in a way that makes it enjoyable to work with. I have used Promash for over 16 years and I’m not looking to change.

5

I’ve tried almost all of them, on various platforms and operating systems.
The one I’ve found to be best by a longshot is BeerAlchemy (for OS X). And I resisted using any brewing software for many years.

Most of these brew programs offer a free trial…best thing to do is take advantage of that, and see which one you are most comfortable with.
I chose BeerAlchemy over all of the others because it has a great, very intuitive user interface, seems to be remarkably (and consistently) accurate, and is easy to customize ingredients lists and other such parameters.

Just my opinion…but in the end, Denny is absolutely right (as per usual): find the one that suits you best.

Honestly, sometimes I actually miss just using a calculator, a pencil, and a sheet of paper. :mrgreen:

6

I’m cheap I use a free software program called brewmate. It does everything I need, give it a try it costs ya nothing.

7

I downloaded Beeralchemy, but I can’t figure out how to scale recipes between a 5-gal batch and 2-gal batch.

Any suggestions.

Thanks

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Multiply x 0.4 to get 2 gallon additions from 5

9

I like BeerSmith

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I’m very happy with Beersmith 2. You can download a full featured trial version for 30 days. If you buy it, you can install it on multiple PC’s under one license.

It is probably the most robust brewing software on the market. I bet it will do anything you want and more. Some people might find “robust” to mean complex or unintuitive, but that was not the case for me. There is also a great support community on the Beersmith 2 website if you have any questions about functionality.

You can install it on a desktop/laptop, store recipes in the cloud (up to 20 for free I think) and access the recipes from an Android or iOS app on your smartphone or tablet. There are two versions of the app. They are not free, but are reasonably priced IMO.

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[quote=“lazy ant brewing”]I downloaded Beeralchemy, but I can’t figure out how to scale recipes between a 5-gal batch and 2-gal batch.

Any suggestions.

Thanks[/quote]
Create 2 different ‘profiles’, one with the volumes you’re targeting for a 5 gal batch and another for 2 gal batches. You can then just switch between profiles and it’ll scale all of your ingredients for you. I do all my recipes in 5 gallon batch quantities but most frequently brew 10 gallons. All I have to do is go to create a new batch and then switch my batch profile and everything is auto updated.

I tried BeerSmith 2 and it is really nice with tons of flexibility but at least when I tried it ingredient inventory wasn’t handled as well as BA 2 does. Biggest area is hops, I can put several batches of hops in inventory with different AA’s and pellet or whole leaf and when I create a new batch from a recipe it automatically changes quantities of hops needed to get the IBU’s from the recipe, it’ll also bridge between batches of hops well when I’m using up the last of one package and need to open another of different AA. Perhaps not a big deal for most but some hop varieties I may have 3 lbs from different suppliers or forms (whole vs. pellet) and I like having all that easy to manage from an inventory standpoint.

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I use beer smith lite on my phone for 100+ batches and love it.

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Thanks for all your responses.

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I use BeerSmith2 and have been very happy with it.

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Brewmate, it’s free. I did make a donation for the use of Bru’n water software.

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Thank you for mentioning Bru’nWater! I consider it to be as important as the basic gravity/bitterness/color calculations. I’d add yeastcalc.co as an equally important piece of brewing software.

I use BeerSmith 2 for my basic calculations, but prefer Bru’nWater for building my water and YeastCalc for my starters.