Beersmith 2 VS BrewersFriend.com

I know this has been discussed many times and I can see most people prefer beersmith2 over just about anything else. I myself own beersmith2, but I find myself going back to brewersfriend time and time again. A couple of things I really find missing that are super useful to me is the way you can track and log your brews in BF, how many times you have brewed a certain recipe, things of that nature. I hate having to save my recipes in BS2 and add brew dates to the name so I can go back and review past brews.

I really wish BS2 had this log/tracking feature. I absolutely love BS2, but with BS2 I still have to keep brew notes in a separate notebook as with BF, I could keep it all online and had access to it anywhere as long as I had internet connection.

In all honesty, I find the 17 bucks every 2 years a minimal fee at best. I know brad is a member here and I hope he plans to expand BS2 to maybe include this feature.

Just for curiosity sake, what program(s) do you use and what is your favorite feature(s)?

BS does have the brew log feature. I have a folder where I keep my master recipes and then when I go to brew one I use the "Copy To Log" feature which copies the recipe to the brew log folder. Then I can make any tweaks necessary and log all the specifics of the brew session in that copy.

cmoewes said:

BS does have the brew log feature. I have a folder where I keep my master recipes and then when I go to brew one I use the "Copy To Log" feature which copies the recipe to the brew log folder. Then I can make any tweaks necessary and log all the specifics of the brew session in that copy.

Click to expand...

I can't believe I never noticed that feature! I always print out and make notes on paper...

You can also set the calendar in BeerSmith to only reflect those recipes that are in your brew log folder. This way recipes that you drum up will not clutter up the calendar so much.

I always print out the recipe for making notes that I edit to transfer back into BeerSmith along with a 'post-mortem' of the brewing day and tasting results.

In the 'Brew Log' folder, I have separate folders for each year and move finished recipes with their notes into these folders so that I don't have to go sorting through a pile of repeated brews to get to the one that I want.

huh... That's also a new feature to me. I will have to check it out. To be honest, I haven't brewed all that much sense getting BS2 set up on my devices so I haven't played around with it all that much.

Thanks for pointing that feature out to those of us getting used to BS2.