I would like to purchase brewing software as a gift for a friend of mine. He has a MAC so it will have to function with that OS. I was hoping I could get some recommendations. From poking around the internet I’ve found Beer Tools Pro, Promash, and BeerSmith. Are any of these any good?
Thanks!!
[quote=“currlib”]I would like to purchase brewing software as a gift for a friend of mine. He has a MAC so it will have to function with that OS. I was hoping I could get some recommendations. From poking around the internet I’ve found Beer Tools Pro, Promash, and BeerSmith. Are any of these any good?
Thanks!![/quote]
I can’t speak for the others, but I’m happy with Beer Smith 2.
Unless someone has built a preference to a piece of brewing software because that is what they are used to I’d suggest Beer Smith, it gets regular updates and has an active community of users. I use Beer Alchemy on my Mac, mostly because when I started brewing a few years ago Beer Smith wasn’t Mac compatible. Beer Alchemy 2.0 isn’t too far off though and I’ve become partial to it because it also has an iOS app that syncs with the desktop version.
Not that I have any experience with the others but I’ll throw my weight behind Beersmith as well. It has easily been the most useful $25 I have spent on brewing and just playing around with the settings on there has taught me a lot. Not that you need to purchase it to get these things but their website is also helpful. They have style descriptions and recipe formulation outlines for a handful of styles that are pretty good and I listen to their podcast occasionally when I go out for runs.
I’m on a MAC …I’ve tried them all. And since you can run many Windoze programs on a Mac using Crossover (without the need to install Windoze OS at all), I’ve test driven almost all of the brewing softwares including ProMash.
In my opinion, if you’re running on MacOS, Beer Alchemy is definitely the way to go. BeerSmith is not bad, but in my opinion Beer Alchemy overall seems to have a much better layout and is more intuitive to use.
I suspect most of these softwares are using the same basic algorithms under the hood for the calcs, but in the course of testing, it seemed that BeerAlchemy consistently delivered the most accurate results, so that’s the one I ultimately purchased.
Although I always turn off the pesky style guidelines feature, it is there (and seems to work quite well) for those who deem it important to brew to competition style parameters.
So to me, Beer Alchemy is the best of the lot. No contest.
I have no connection with the people who wrote it or the company that sells it.
In fact, I stubbornly resisted relying on brewing software (or even using it at all) for the most part until last year or two. I haven’t discarded my spiral bound notebook, but I check all of my numbers and targets with the software and am very pleased with the way it performs.
Try Brewmate, it’s free and does an adequate job.
[quote=“TG”]I grew up with ProMash and it is getting an update.
You can get a trial version at promash.com[/quote]
Yes but when ?
“in the next 6 months”
http://promash.com/proboard/index.htmloops, won’t link to the topic. Go into the forums, brewery in general, promash future
since your on a mac i would suggest beersmith 2
I like beer alchemy and beer smith, but you can’t go wrong with a spreadsheet on excel and the ol’ pen and notebook.
[quote=“shredd3r”]but you can’t go wrong with a spreadsheet on excel and the ol’ pen and notebook.[/quote]+1 Building the spreadsheet is fun (but I’m the guy who does MS Office support for my group, so I like fiddling with formulas).
+2 on the excel spreadsheet
As to the original question, I’ve used Beer Smith and agree with what others have said that it’s a pretty good program and I suppose it’s nice to have around to use as a sanity check against my spreadsheet every now and then. Haven’t used any of the others mentioned.
I’ll give another vote for BeerAlchemy. The developer is always improving it and provides impeccable support that he should be proud of. And no, I am not affiliated with the program other than being a happy customer.
Beer Smith went live with the cloud today. So you can put recipes online and access them anywhere. I haven’t looked too much into it, but I think it will be a great feature since I always want to access my recipes at work.
They let you brew at your office?
KewwwwL. :mrgreen:
(for MAC users, I’d still recommend Beer Alchemy over anything else though.)
I’ve used Promash for years and have just recently converted all my files into Beersmith. The nice thing about Beersmith is you can export your files to your smart phone and load them in a free app called Brewr. Brewr gives you a nifty little brew timer that alarms when hop additions are supposed to go in.
I’ve user Beer Tools Pro as well but Beersmith is much easier to use all the way around.
its free and does a nice job. download it to get a feel for the brewing programs and if you want to spend money on another program you will have a working experience for how the programs work.
Brewersfriend.com and Hopville.com are both pretty nice free online options. I fool around with recipes during downtime at work, so these are nice options.
I’m somewhat new to brewing (still and extract brewer and only for six months) but I’m partial to Beer Smith as well. They just updated or will on the 15th to 2.1 and the cloud function may be a real nice addition to the program, although I haven’t really looked into it yet. Regular updates and emails with videos and hints/ and tips make BeerSmith the choice for me.
I noticed nobody ahead of me mentioned Tasty Brew…
http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/recipe.htmlHalfway decent FREE recipe calculator but it’s missing some things. Still, it’s what I used before spending the 28 bucks for BrewSmith…
