Beer Brewing software

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dbriggs10

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I'm thinking about investing in one of the beer brewing apps. Does anyone have any insight on which one I should get?? Any insight would be very helpful.

Thanks.
 
Well, I personally like Beersmith. It's got a three-week free trial, so download it and take it for a spin. I've heard good things about BeerTools Pro, but have not used it myself and can't comment on whether it's good or bad.

I don't care for ProMash's interface. All three will do the job, though, and there are some free programs out there that others swear by.
 
I tried the free trial on Promash and Beersmith and ended up buying Beer Tools Pro. I like BTP the best, but thought Beersmith was good too. I didn't like Promash at all.
 
I've got ProMash (had it since 2001). I wish it did a few things it doesn't do (like price my recipes, print an entire inventory, measure hops in grams, show estimated SRM as a color, etc.). I'm playing with Beersmith right now, but I'm not crazy about it's interface. I'll have to check out BTP.

Other than it's shortcomings, Promash is a pretty good tool. I actually have a couple of tools loaded onto my PocketPC phone from Promash that comes in very handy on brew day. I've got a first strike calculator, hydrometer calculator, and an alc. content calculator. Unfortunately, they don't communicate with the actual program, but they are handy to have.
 
I dl'd and tried all three and wound up buying beersmith. I just like the interface better. I didn't like promash at all.


Dan
 
I'm using the beer smith trial and I'm going to be buying. It's a great tool. I tried Promash and didn't like it.
 
I'm on a Mac, and have been quite happy with BeerAlchemy. Yesterday I hit a bug with my trial version, and the owner has e-mailed me back twice trying to troubleshoot the problem (he found the glitch, now to just fix it).

It has a long trial session if you don't restart your computer often, and seems to think of a lot of things I don't.

But, I'm on a Mac, like I said, and a lot of people aren't.

kvh
 
Yuri_Rage said:
Didn't like the ProMash trial. Bought BeerSmith and later bought BTP. I don't like BTP very much. I use BeerSmith constantly.

You've probably answered this before, but what don't you like about BTP?
 
the_bird said:
You've probably answered this before, but what don't you like about BTP?
BTP's interface was a bit awkward, and the whole thing just seemed "unpolished." I didn't like having to open new instances of BTP to switch between recipes, and creating recipes was less intuitive than with BeerSmith.
 
For the free tools I've tried Qbrew and Brewsta. I do partial boils and therefore didn't like QBrew. Brewsta has the option of adjusting preboil volume and post boil volume. If I set preboil down to 3 or so and post at 5 then it correctly calulates my gravity and therefore hop utilization. The indredients list is pretty generic but if you have the inclination you can edit it to your hearts content. I'm still doing partial mash though so I don't know how it does calc'ing variables for the mash and sparge.
 
I'm glad this was posted. I am now 95% on Linux and was going to look for open source brewing tools. Since I'm also a partial mash type of brewer, I guess I don't need to try out Qbrew. I'll give Brewsta a shot. Thanks for the guidance.
 
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