promash vs beersmith

I was wondering if anyone else has shared this experience? I was formulating a barleywine recipe in beersmith and came up with a number on IBU's and alcohol %, etc. I happened to be telling a friend (who runs promash) about my recipe and he ran it through promash and came up with significantly different #'s. (40 IBU beersmith vs 120 IBU promash) Anyone else had this experience?

Hmmm. It's hard to believe they're that far off. I only recently started using Beersmith, but I haven't checked any of the numbers against the manual calculations I had done previously. I think I will now just to see.

I don't use beersmith, but I do use promash. I assume both are competent at IBU estimating. There are different types of bittering charts in use. I use tinseth in promash.

There are so many ways to input the 'same' recipe, I wouldn't be surprised at a difference between the two. That doesn't mean that one is correct or incorrect.

But that much of a difference doesn't make sense. Check your Beersmith input, particularly your boil times.

Perhaps it has something to do with the units for small differences - types of hops (pellets/whole).

The significant margin of error seams to be IBU vs. HBU.

Cheers.

I use Beersmith but your post is more about the IBU calculations. Tinseth, Rager & Garetz are the ones that come to mind. I personally use Tinseth, but if you find one that works for you, and you stick to it and know how to adjust around it based on experience, then you're fine.

well it is not strictly IBU's....the two profiles of the same recipe had different IBU's, extimated SG, and estimated alcohol % using the EXACT same malts, hops, addition times, and boil volumes. I mentioned this to a coworker who uses beersmith. He was curious and downloaded promash and added some of his beersmith recipes into promash and came up with different results every time. Although not as drastic as my barleywine example.

After checking the settings in promash and beersmith it looks like the default scale for promash is the rager scale and the default for beersmith is the tensith scale. I think this is why you and your friend came up with different estimates for the IBUs.