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)?

I know Brad is working on an update to BS, but not sure how soon that will be. I use BS and put a ton of recipes into it (everything in BYO, Zymurgy, etc) just to have. But to track my own brews, I just created a folder "My Brews" and then sub-folders under that for each year.

I agree that it would be nice to have logging/note tracking in Beersmith. I wound up going low-tech, and print recipes out and add measurements + notes to the sheet...helps keep electronics away from the kettle too. But it would be super handy to be able to add those into BS2, as a portable repository (I have BS on my Mac, phone, and tablet...do a lot of recipe-building on planes, so the cloud bit is awesome).

I use the calculators and recipe builders from Brewer's Friend and record everything in Evernote or Google Keep so as I'm brewing I can update things on my devices/grab what I need from at the LHBS without logging in anywhere. I've tried BeerSmith but since running Fedora I can't use the Linux version (which packaged as a .deb) without waaaaay more legwork than it is worth to me wheras Brewer's Friend and the notebook software I use are platform independent. I don't find I lose much if anything in the way of usability by sticking with Brewer's friend vs. BeerSmith either and the recipe builder is much easier to see what my changes do and seeing all the different metrics at once is quite helpful.

Beersmith has a recipe "Version" number in the top right corner. I've never used it but I'm thinking this is what you are looking for.

seefish said:

Beersmith has a recipe "Version" number in the top right corner. I've never used it but I'm thinking this is what you are looking for.

Click to expand...

Nope, the version # is an internal field to the recipe that's open.

If you want to make different versions, you've got to put it in the Name field. Like Belgian Wit v1.0, Belgian Wit v1.1, Belgian Wit v2.0, etc.

Duplicate the recipe first, then change the iteration/version name, open to change version # and Save.
OR... open the existing, change the version #, then Save AS under the new iteration/version name.

<Undo> doesn't "undo" what you expect it should, either...

I answered this on your other thread of the same title... You might want to condense them to keep the suggestions and comments in one thread. Easier to find and refer to.