BeerSmith demos or guides?

I have about 4 extract brews under my belt as well as 2 all grain. I bought the BeerSmith software to help me figure out recipes and create my own recipes. But I don't have a clue how to use it. It is very overwhelming considering I have only used step by step recipes. I just recently made a Belgian pale ale that did not give me the amount of water I needed to start with and its temperatures for all grain brewing. I just winged it using some of the same steps from a recipe I had followed before. My final gravity was way off. Does anyone have any guides or demos I can check out to get better at using BeerSmith so that this does not happen again?

My first recommendation is to check out the videos on the Beer Smith Web Site. This will give you an idea of where to begin and how to get ther.
The place that I would begin is by building my equipment profile. This is an area of the program that uses set values for your equipment that will be used to make various calculations. You would indicate the type of Boil Kettle you have (the volume of the kettle is quite important). You would also indicate the amount of dead space that you have in your kettle. To calculate the dead space, you might put in a known volume of water into your boil kettle, and then siphon it out of your kettel (I am assuming that you have a ball valve in your kettle). You would then measure the volume of water that will not drain out of the kettle because you now get air in the siphon. This value will be used to make the calucalations for how much wort must be produced to get a specific volume into the fermenter.
You will also have to make similar calculations for you mash tun. If you use a cooler for a mash tun, you will want to know how much it weighs, and the material that is is made of. All of this will affect the specific heat of the mash tun calculations, which will be used to determine your strike water temperatures.
I wish that the program came with a users manual, but no such luck. However, there is a users manual of sorts on the web site. Get that file and read through it. It will help you to understand the various profiles: Equipment Profiles, Mash Profiles, etc. This will go a far way to getting you started and being more comfortable with the program.

I hope that this helps.

Mark

When I first got into home brewing, I looked at BeerSmith and a few other similar class of software tools and I too found them just too overwhelming for my skill level. I went with a simple, but good beer recipe database application (SUDS) instead. It has no recipe design capabilities, but was a handy way to organize and track my brewing efforts.

Years later, with much more brewing experience, I made the move to BeerSmith and have been very happy with it. It is a great design tool, but definitely intended for those with intermediate to advanced brewing skill. Before you delve too far into creating your own recipes, my suggestion is to use BeerSmith for brewing a few existing recipes. Just enter them into BeerSmith and brew as directed. This will give you the chance to use the features of the app and see how ingredients effect the recipe. Then, take an existing recipe or three and use them as a template for creating your own (rather than starting entirely from scratch). You can tweak individual ingredients of the recipe and see how they effect the characteristics of the brew. I especially like the graphs in BeerSmith which show the characteristics of your recipe versus a given style profile. I think tweaking a few existing recipes is a good way to learn BeerSmith and to learn how to design your own recipes.

Also, pick up a copy of "Designing Great Beers" by Daniels. This is a great reference, which can help build your knowledge of beer styles and recipe designs. This knowledge will go a long way to making BeerSmith more comprehensible and useful to you.