im an idiot...can somebody explain beersmith or where to find good tutorial?

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beerhound28

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Hello
I just bought beersmith and sadly i dont know what im doing..alot of stuff is confusing..Is there a tutorial for dummies out there?
 
Sadly a lot of it IS confusing. Don't feel alone. I still find the equipment setup to be confusing.

There is some help right on the Beersmith website. I think they have tutorials and I know there are forums, although getting questions answered is somewhat hit or miss.

There are many people on this site who can answer basic questions as well I think.

The newer version has a couple of nice features, but IMO is a little more difficult to understand as far as the UI goes. In essence the procedure is as follows:

Set up your equipment profile (mash tun, boil kettle, etc.)
choose a new recipe
select the style
Start entering ingredients
read the bars underneath to see how the recipe matches the style guidelines

If you have your equipment set up properly you should get a brewsheet that tells how much water to use, etc.

Also, Beersmith is NOT a replacement for knowing how to brew. It's simply a calculator tool and shortcut device. It would be somewhat difficult to understand if you don't already know the terms and methods of brewing.
 
So in the equipment setup,how do i figure out mash tun specific heat,lauter tun dead space,brewhouse efficiency,boil off,cooling shrinkage etc? Im using a 10 gallon igloo round cooler with water supply braid ,9 gallon brew pot..how am i supposed to know evaporation rates..should i boil 5 gallons of water for an hour and calculate how much i lose in a hour? anyway thanks
 
You really are not alone. I still get cross-eyed when trying to get certain things done in BeerSmith, and I've been using it for a while. I had a hard time setting up evaporation rates, for example. The equipment setup is not intuitive either as Homercidal mentioned.

But it's still a very powerful and robust piece of code, despite its UI shortcomings.

For evaporation rates, Ray Daniels (in his book Designing Great Beers) recommends using 5% per hour as your base number unless you want to do as you said and perform your own experiment (big breweries cite this as their figure).
 
Thanks everyone ..im assuming that this software will take some practice and intuition.but once i get the equiptment setup proper things will start to come together..thanks again yall
 
Yes, some things you will have to enter as you find out what they are for YOUR system. Such as evap rate (may vary some depending on season) and your personal efficiency, etc. Take informed estimates and adjust from there.
 
I am fairly new to BeerSmith as well. I took the Pot and Cooler presets and worked from there. I would estimate your boil off at 1 gallon/hour. The tun deadspace is easy to measure(fill with water and drain then measure how much is left in the tun). The thing is you have keep adjusting your profiles for the first few batches before you get it right.
 
No, you're not an idiot, or no more than the rest of us. It's a great program, but it's confusing at times, and I think the help/support forum can be just as frustrating.
 
I agree with all above, it took me several batches and careful note taking during each session to really dial in all the set up info and as well it changes from winter to summer.

I created 3 different equipment profiles, one spring, one fall/winter and one summer so when I create a recipe I just select the appropriate season set up, works great!

Then I got a bigger brew kettle and had to start all over again.....
 
Version 2.0 was an improvement in many areas, but the user interface is a disaster. I really do mean that; I have not seen one as cluttered.

It does work well, though. For those of us that were familiar with the older versions, the learning curve was short. I do feel bad for those just picking it up.
 
Hello
I just bought beersmith and sadly i dont know what im doing..alot of stuff is confusing..Is there a tutorial for dummies out there?
I asked the same question when I first started using Beersmith. Someone suggested reading a book called Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels and I took his advice. Turns out that book did help me better understand what Beersmith is all about. The book isn't a "how-to" for Beersmith, instead it teaches you the basics of creating your own recipes and Beersmith is a tool to help make recipe design easier. After reading this book Beersmith started to click with me. Hope that makes sense!
 
Take a look at the following thread. http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php/topic,5140.0.html

It's an excellent howto for setting up your equipment profile. Before I read it and properly setup my equipment I couldn't make heads or tails out of how beersmith was telling me to handle my mash as the values seems all over the place.

I was only using it for recipe input which kind of bummed me out as I could do the same thing in MS Word and save $30. Once I got my equipment profile entered everything 'clicked' a lot better and I'll be brewing this weekend and fine tuning the profile.
 
Take a look at the following thread. http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php/topic,5140.0.html

It's an excellent howto for setting up your equipment profile. Before I read it and properly setup my equipment I couldn't make heads or tails out of how beersmith was telling me to handle my mash as the values seems all over the place.

I was only using it for recipe input which kind of bummed me out as I could do the same thing in MS Word and save $30. Once I got my equipment profile entered everything 'clicked' a lot better and I'll be brewing this weekend and fine tuning the profile.
That was a great help...thanks
 
I didn't want to start a new thread so throwing this in here because up till now I've been pretty happy with BSII.

I don't know what I clicked on but there use to be a button, I think it was called "preview" located on the right side of the screen and you could select "brewsheet", "competition", "text", etc to preview.

The drill down option has gone and now the only thing I can find is a button on the top of the screen that says "brewsheet" which gives a preview of the brewsheet but where did the other options go?. There is (I think) a new preview button at the top of the screen which I find useless.

Any clues what I might have done to cause this?

Here is what I found in the BeerSmith 2 help page but I'm still lost. (not that unusual :) )

BeerSmith 2 has the ability to print and preview a diverse set of report formats. The program has a number of basic (text, brewsheet, competition, etc) preloaded with the program and you also have the ability to make custom reports if you desire.

Reports are displayed in the preview window typically shown below or to the right of major data views such as the profile, ingredient and recipe folder views. These reports can be printed or previewed using the print and preview commands. You can change the current report format using the drop-down on the title bar of the preview window.
 
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