Beer software?

My father and I recently started brewing. I have seen a lot of talk about brewing software and we were wondering what is it exactly and is it worth spending the money on? Has anyone used it? Thank you for your help!

 

http://beersmith.com/

 

+1 for Beersmith. Plug in your hardware specs, recipe ingredients and other info and get a complete brew day sheet with ABV, Estimated O.G. & F.G. and other important information. It takes a few brew days to get it dialed in but after that its easy to use and allows you at keep track of all of your recipes in one place. Oh, and there's a cloud based recipe option that allows you to browse through hundreds of recipes and download any that you might want to try. I believe Birdman Brewing had it for about $21 which is very reasonable.

 

Another +1 for BeerSmith. I checked out a few others including some that are "free" and BeerSmith was hands down the best and worth the money IMHO.

 

www.brewersfriend.com

Decent program. Cloud based. Cheap.
The three points of awesomeness!

Check it out.
- B916

 

I use beer alchemy in my iPhone tracks recipes ingredients plus all sorts of brew day calculators. Very handy app. Definately was worth the money.

 

Never used anything other than BeerSmith so I can't comment on other software, but again I haven't used anything other than BeerSmith and probably never will.

 

There are enough 'Help with Beersmith' threads on these forums to make me NOT want to try that platform. Not only would it cost me a recurring fee to port all of my recipes over to their cloud server, the client itself is not truly cloud based so I can't tinker with the app and my recipes from work, home/desk, home/laptop, tablet, etc.

Just sayin' - but whatever works for you...

 

I know alot of people who use beersmith. Personally I use iBrewmaster on my iPhone. It's handy to have to reference and has built in timers for hop additions, etc.

 

I have moved my stuff over to www.brewersfriend.com
I like it better than the new beersmith.

 

I've been using the one at http://www.brewers-assistant.com. Smooth graphics, ton of features and it's free.

 

iBrewmaster

 

I've only used Beersmith 2. There is a bit of a learning curve but once you understand it you'll find it's a pretty slick program, I've scaled a couple of recipes to 10 gallon batches from 5 gallon and they turned out perfect. Can't really go wrong for the price.

Louis

 

I think you have so many "Help with Beersmith" threads for two reasons, it is more thorough than most (if not all) of the alternatives and, probably the main reason, there are a lot of people using it. As far as sharing recipes across different platforms goes, I simply have the program save its settings to a dropbox directory and I have access anywhere that I want. I only upload a recipe to the beersmith cloud (the lure of which generally eludes me) when I want to have access from my phone. You get a small number of free uploads.

All of that said, I don't use Beersmith's yeast or water tools. There are much better alternatives for both out there.

 

+1 for iBrewMaster