Searching for the holy grail in recipe and brewsoftware, does it exist?

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Koffie

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I'm searching for new brewsoftware, with a lot of requirements. So far, I haven't found something that fully fits my wishes.
My list of requirements, please let me know if anything gets close enough to try ;)

- Webbassed, online, cloud. No local installation.
- Metric system
- multiple equipment profiles
- inventory based (maintain inventory, highlight what recipe you can brew based on inventory, deduct inventory based on brewsession)
- clone/snapshot a base recipe to a brewsession. Edit the brew recipe withoud altering original recipe
- Easily change hops and/or alpa on brewsession without manually recalculating IBU
- Clear info on water/mash volumes (based on current recipe and equipment, does it fit the mashtun? How much to many ?)
- Private recipes, option to share without being added to a recipe DB
- Reasonable pricing

So far BrewersFriend is closest to my requirements, but after 1 year o payed membership I don;t see any big changed. It looks dead to me just cashing on userbase.

Is there any online recipe- / brewsoftware that fits my needs ?
 
I used Brewers friend for a bit and recently converted to beersmith and won't turn back. Brew smith offers so much more than bf. The only downside is it is local installation although there is a cloud service, I have yet to try it out.
 
Thanks, but BeerSmith doesn't seem to have any 'brew this recipe' options , or am I looking in th wrong sections ?
 
Thanks, but BeerSmith doesn't seem to have any 'brew this recipe' options , or am I looking in th wrong sections ?

Any recipe can be given a brew session. Use the button labeled "Copy to Brew Log." BeerSmith will create that folder for you. Now, each recipe you put in there can be modified without changing the original. As things evolve, you can see a history of your beers. You can sort them by brew date, name or any of the columns that you choose to see.

The ideal thing about BeerSmith is that even as you update your equipment or try new techniques, past recipes don't get updated so that you can see exactly what you did when making that recipe.

Another handy feature that you can customize is the basic recipe that you see each time you add a new recipe. Just populate a recipe with basic items you use in every recipe, like base malt, foundation bittering, irish moss, your favorite yeast, etc. Use your equipment, mash, fermentation and packaging profiles and give it a generic name. Then click "Save as Default" and that recipe will be the starting point.

Although BeerSmith is resident on your computer, it is also extremely customizable to your specific needs. Cloud based software probably wouldn't be as flexible because that would mean storing tens of thousands of individualized settings, making "reasonable price" something open to interpretation. As it is, there are free and paid levels of the BeerSmith cloud for storing recipes.
 
I have played a bit with BeerSmith today, but I'm missing to much of my requirements to make the switch. I would be goping from one half working program to a other (not found : inventory based brewing, easliy adjust hop alpha without recalculaitng IBU).
Probably sometyhing I should get used to, but the look and feel of BeerSmith was not what I'm looking for.
 
Actually, BeerSmith is only missing the non-resident and predictive recipe design portions of your list.

Both Brewer's Friend and BeerSmith are excellent brewing tools and there are more out there. Neither is a perfect solution for every possible scenario home brewers can dream up. I don't think there's a single one that'd do a BIAB, Parti-gyle, no boil, hop burst, no chill, multi yeast with flax sugar added daily, triple Black Gose recipe. When you go off the map, you become your own cartographer.

Maybe your needs are such that you need more than one tool. That's all a part of being a Brewer. The program organizes your data, but you can't abdicate your part to know what to do with it.
 
I didn't found the inventory based stuff in BS ? Did I overlook? Only option I could find, was add ingredients to inventory and deduct them when brewing. But not giving info on breweable recipes, based on inventory ? (or perhaps I don't understand your first line to well, since I'm not native English).
 
I think your only option to find something that fits all your requirements is to write it yourself. Everything else that I'm aware of has fewer features that brewsmith.
 
I didn't found the inventory based stuff in BS ? Did I overlook? Only option I could find, was add ingredients to inventory and deduct them when brewing. But not giving info on breweable recipes, based on inventory ? (or perhaps I don't understand your first line to well, since I'm not native English).

You may want to e-mail Beersmith about what you would like to do. He may be able to recommend a workaround in BS that would only be obvious to the inventor.
 
(or perhaps I don't understand your first line to well, since I'm not native English).

Sorry. I didn't mean to be unclear.

You're correct. The current version of BeerSmith won't create a recipe from your inventory. It may come back as a feature, someday.

That feature wasn't as great as it sounds, though. The more leftovers you had, the closer it'd get to Brown Ale or Porter. It would never tell you to make a Tripel if you had any Chocolate Malt lying around. To have more variety, it'd require a level of fuzzy logic that would push the software cost way up.

Instead, the program does have a shopping list. Once a recipe is designed, you add it to the shopping list, then you end up buying only what you need for the foreseeable future. Once ingredients arrive, it's just a couple of clicks to add them to your inventory. That's a lot less money wasted. It also guarantees you'll get beer you want, instead of beer you have to make.

If you're concerned about buying in bulk and having grain lying around.... As you decide on new beers, you can choose ingredients based on what's in inventory. There's a simple toggle box for every ingredient group that shows what's on hand. The same thing can be done for substitutions in existing recipes.
 
There is another feature you asked for that is in BeerSmith, but isn't obvious. Like a lot of features, it's hidden in plain sight.

Easily change hops and/or alpha on brewsession without manually recalculating IBU

Ok, just to start, BeerSmith can't read your mind a know if you do or don't want a substitution to do anything more than calculate as-is. If you want to know what the IBUs will be because something has more or less AA% than is in the recipe, you have options.

1) Simply double click the hop in the recipe found in the brew log, and change the AA%. The IBU will now represent the same weight at a different AA%. From there, you can change the weight to match the IBU contribution of that one hop.

2) You can substitute any number of hops, then double click on the IBU bar below the recipe window. The popup will let you slide the total IBU number for the recipe. BeerSmith will recalculate weights for all of the hops in your recipe that contribute 1 or more IBUs so that the total matches the bar.

3) If you've had some hops for a while, you can use the hop ageing tool to predict where the AA% is. Then you can modify the AA% in the brew log to see what the IBU contribution is and make a decision on whether to add more hop weight.
 
Thanks for all the helps and tips.
I have created my own Excel sheet in the past. All my recipes and inventory where in the workbook. On the first sheet is a index of all the recipes. Each recipe will color red or green, depending on the ability to brew that recipe based on inventory. Even beter, highlight a recipe and it would provide a tooltip telling me what ingredient and amount I'm short. This way I can see immediately if I can brew the recipe and if not, what I should buy (or change). When I'm just short in 100 gram pisner malt I can decide to brew it anyway.



When it comes to brewing/recipe I have double fields for alpha and amount. One for the original recipe and one for the brew. Changing the brew alpha field would instant recalculate the second amount field for the brew. This was shown the be very handy on a brew day. Simply take the desired hop out of the freezer and read alpha. Update the alpha (if it differs from recipe) and it will give you the correct amount. No fiddling with extra hop entrys or short-time remember IBU from that specific hop addition.



I really do understand that I'm very specific with my requirements. But since I had it all in excel, knowing how easy such features make your brewday, I can't understand why it's so difficult to find brewsoftware with these options.
 

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