Free Brewing Programs or aps that are good

Are there any free brewing programs or aps that are good which you recommend?

I use brewzor pro beta. Pretty good app

hopville.com

Brewzor for the phone is quite good.

brewmate is a free recipe program works well.

I use brewr on android for recipes when I'm at the store or out brewing. I wish Beersmith would export to a phone so you could take recipe to the store or out to the boil kettle.

No personal experience with it, but when I asked a while back brewtarget came up. I run linux and brew target runs on linux. Also, looks like they have versions for Mac and Windows.

http://www.brewtarget.org/

I'm a fan of hopville.com. Its good for starting out and fairly easy to get up to speed.

I've been using brewtarget, which Doctor Wily mentioned above. It's usable, but not phenomenal. The interface has some serious quirks, both superficial and deeper.

For example, it's very annoying to modify your batch volume on the fly. For a PM brewer, especially, this is a big problem. The final size of the batch and the amount of dilution water you're going to add are fixed as part of your "equipment" for the batch. So if I want to play around with mash volumes or something, if I produce less wort than I originally planned, I have to go through a multi-step process to adjust the dilution volume and find out what the real effect on the finished product is.

The minor ones are things like rows in the grain bill jumping around in an unexpected way when you're editing quantities.

Anyway, it's the only one I've really used. It gets the job done, and I appreciate the effort that has gone into it. I recommend it if you're willing to put in a little effort to use it. It runs on mac and linux, which is nice.

just played with the hopville calc, it's interesting. I dont know much about building recipes yet but it seems like it can do it. The software held my hand thru making a specific BJCP style of beer.

BrewR app for android based smart phones is my fave. I like the brew day timer feature.

Gary

On the iPhone I LOVE BrewPal (not free, but it's 1.99, so in terms of how much you can use it for each brew session you do, basically free). It let's you store recipes, create your own and see how they measure up against the BJCP styles, has the BJCP styles guide built in seperate for reference, hop substitution guides and a sweet brewday timer/alarm. It also analyzes your actual versus anticipated results to tell you your attenuation and mash efficiency. Only thing it doesn't do is calculate yeast based on re-using yeast, so you still need Mr. Malty for that.

Online (for free) I've been playing around with Brewer's Friend.

I'm on brewersfriend.com there's a free version and a pay version. The features are pretty cool and it's only 10 bucks a year if you join. Also, the webmasters are pretty responsive and helpful with adding features for people.

Hopville looks nice, but what bugs me is that the recipes you browse have no way to leave comments. I'm a new brewer, it means a lot to me to find a recipe that people can vouch for, since I can't yet look at a recipe and know it's any good.

I know you asked for free ones, but the depth of the tools available in Beersmith for $20 is astounding. Yes, it is $27.95 regularly, but I frequently see it on sale for about $20.

Horseflesh said:

Hopville looks nice, but what bugs me is that the recipes you browse have no way to leave comments. I'm a new brewer, it means a lot to me to find a recipe that people can vouch for, since I can't yet look at a recipe and know it's any good.

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Rarely will you see comments from other people. Most users are just using it for the calculator and store their recipes. I found it useful cause they categorized all the recipes by style, but since the new 2.0 beta release it's not there from what I just seen.

I've been using hopville for the most part as I find it easy to use, but I need to get into beersmith as you can do more to have a more precise recipe.