is "hopville.com" a good site?

Has anyone ever used Hopville's Beer Calculus?

How good are their calculators with IBUs, SRM, original and final gravities?

I'm just curious because I used it to make a recipe and I wanna know how close they are.

Thanks

It's all I've used for years. I set the hops to "tinseth" and my beer has scored well in comp (ibus to style)

My gravities (matched with my efficiency) are always dead on. It's a solid free program. SRM is good too.

I've been using Beer Calculus as well, but I've noticed something to be wary of. The dropdown list of ingredients allows users to add fermentables that might not be listed. I'm not sure what the vetting process is for the information, but the numbers on those user-added ingredients could potentially be off.

you have to adjust it to work with your brewhouse. For me, the grain bill seems to match up well, but i seem to get better utilization with my hops than their calculations would give. Also the finishing gravity they give is garbage. you have to scale it way down depending on mash temps and yeast attenuations for the strain you use.

Right on, thanks guys

is anyone having trouble getting on hopville the last couple days (from 05/15/11) ... i cant get the website to come on at all right now??

Working fine for me...

I like to tinker with hopville when I'm on a break at work but I use Beersmith at home for my formal recipes.

I started using it before the allowed you to save your recipes, in fact that inability to do so was what led me to choose beersmith, And then they added the hopville part of it about 6 months after I started using BS. Had I started using it after hopville came online, I probably would never had switched. As it is I still use it whenever I need to do a recipe and I'm not at a beersmith loaded computer.

A couple of my recipes are on there still.

FromZwolle said:

you have to adjust it to work with your brewhouse. For me, the grain bill seems to match up well, but i seem to get better utilization with my hops than their calculations would give. Also the finishing gravity they give is garbage. you have to scale it way down depending on mash temps and yeast attenuations for the strain you use.

Click to expand...

I think it's great, and for my batches that I bother to check a FG it has actually been accurate

If you use it for extract brewing it probably wont be as good at predicting FG since they seem to be all over the place with some folks almost never being able to get a batch to finish much below 1.020.

There are a couple shortfalls... I dislike the selections for the mash profiles but that's purely a matter of taste. I also wish that there was a better way to represent the ferm schedule but that's true of BS too. I wish that the export utility was more robust and lastly, I wish that the notes were in the recipe itself...