Home Brew Application

[kevin58]

Yep, it's survived multiple moves from computer to computer, currently lives on my laptop. Works fine. I find it pretty effortless, but then I don't know any better. Makes me want to know what's out there. What do you use?

I test drove pretty much all that was out there at the time and settled on Beersmith.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

I use Larry's spreadsheet. It's free. You can tell he's an engineer. It's very detailed. He's been maintaining it for years. He's even got a (nearly 2 hour) video showing how everything's calculated.

Thank you for sharing this. For those who have (or are thinking about creating) a custom spreadsheet, the UT video has some interesting ideas. For me, it played well at 1.5x (and higher).

After watching it, I was left with a couple of ideas that I might add to my spreadsheet (although, I use Excel for recipe calculations and Word for brew day process & notes).

 

[user 246304]

I test drove pretty much all that was out there at the time and settled on Beersmith.

Do you have the one-time desktop version, or subscribe? I'm techno-challenged....basically is the benefit of the subscription the ability to use the web platform for recipes?

 

[DonT]

For me, I like the software part of it, using Beersmith that is, because I can develop a recipe using the database of ingredients. I routinely check the standard specs against the recent purchase of ingredients to see if they jive. Probably doesn't make a huge difference but I sometimes think it does.

I enjoy the software part of it too, and use Beersmith for recipe creation and organization. I'll supplement that with EZ Water for water salts and acid additions. I also use a spreedsheet that @doug293cz kindly gave me to check water volumes and gravities. It's a little bit of back and forth but not too bad, and it's relaxing to me...lol.

 

[doug293cz]

I enjoy the software part of it too, and use Beersmith for recipe creation and organization. I'll supplement that with EZ Water for water salts and acid additions. I also use a spreedsheet that @doug293cz kindly gave me to check water volumes and gravities. It's a little bit of back and forth but not too bad, and it's relaxing to me...lol.

The spreadsheet DonT mentioned can be found here. It should be downloaded as either an Excel sheet or LibreOffice sheet in order to use all of its capabilities.

The sheet is a mash and lauter simulator for batch sparge and no-sparge. It can give you an idea of what might happen with a fly sparge (by using the triple batch sparge option), but might over or under estimate lauter results depending on just how good your fly sparge technique is.

Brew on

 

[kevin58]

Do you have the one-time desktop version, or subscribe? I'm techno-challenged....basically is the benefit of the subscription the ability to use the web platform for recipes?

I started with the one time desktop way back when version 2 was new. Over time I switched to the the subscription for the sole reason that I had collected far too many recipes. Each level has a limit on how many you can keep in the cloud space and the 12 or 14 that came with the the one time plan started to get problematic. For a while I simply deleted a few from the cloud every now and then but I would often have to upload them again at a later date when I brewed that recipe again. It just made more sense for me to upgrade to a subscription and not have to worry about it.

 

[danb35]

Brewfather user here. I'm also not a fan of subscription-based software, but I pay for BF, the main reasons being that it isn't that expensive and it works pretty darned well. I do not, as someone asked somewhat facetiously up-thread, need access to my recipes 24x7x365--but I do have different computers in my study and in my brewing space, and it's certainly convenient that I can share information between them. It will log data from an iSpindel or a Tilt, both of which i have, and the iSpindel logging is really the reason I paid for the subscription in the first place.

I also prefer to self-host my software when possible. I'm not aware of anything like Brewfather that can be self-hosted, though. Fermentrack works fine for tracking the fermentation process, but it doesn't do anything in terms of recipe development.

 

[Stikius]

I use Brewfather when creating recipes, then print it out on paper and take notes while brewing, and then go back to Brewfather again while fermenting. Mainly due to the fact that I have RAPT Pill and it's nice to track fermentation. Brewfather or any other software does it's best at recipe creation in my opinion (I'm to lazy to calculate everything manually) and all other math related things (calculate efficiency, etc.). A spreadsheet could do the same really

 

[keggert]

I use BrewTarget. They stopped using the old web site and you can now get the updated versions here. Newest version is currently 3.0.10

 

[hotbeer]

I use BrewTarget. They stopped using the old web site and you can now get the updated versions here. Newest version is currently 3.0.10

Thanks for that information. I just assumed that when the website for the old version didn't have anymore updates that it'd been abandoned.

I just took a quick look at the site you linked. Do you know if this is the original writer or team that wrote Brewtarget. Or did someone else pick it up to maintain?

I use Brewtarget too.

 

[keggert]

Thanks for that information. I just assumed that when the website for the old version didn't have anymore updates that it'd been abandoned.

I just took a quick look at the site you linked. Do you know if this is the original writer or team that wrote Brewtarget. Or did someone else pick it up to maintain?

I use Brewtarget too.

I don't know if it is the original team. I stumbled on it a few months back when my old version crashed and deleted my brewing history/database. When i googled the problem I had that website came up as one of the answers.

I've been using it since and I haven't had any issues with it. It does open a DOS window that remains open while using the program. If you close the DOS window the program closes as well. Found it slightly annoying, but now I just ignore the window

 

[delium55]

Take a look to Beerrxcel V2 on Catégorie:Outils — Le Wiki du Brassage Amateur you find all to brew, create recipe etc.

 

[BrewDrinkRepeat]

For me, using brewing software goes far beyond a recipe database; my entire system and process is represented in the software, and for any selected recipe I can see accurate volumes and quantities, and I'm "guided" to hit all of the targets on brewday.

You have to go through the process of creating a equipment profiles in the software, but IMO it's time WELL-SPENT.

The mathematical side of recipe design is a breeze, all of my quantities / volumes are spot-on correct, I hit all of my numbers every single time, and once I have a recipe dialed-in I can brew it consistently and repeatedly, even if I change equipment at some point.

And scaling someone else's recipe to my system, or mine to theirs, is literally a click.

---

I currently use BrewFather, very very happily. I don't love that it's a cloud-only model, but only because my data isn't stored locally and I have to do a manual datadump.

The subscription doesn't bother me one bit, as I get tremendous value from the software. It is the best I've ever used, and the Batch feature (the true power of BF) is off-the-charts amazing.

And hopefully, maintaining a steady income stream means they'll remain an active developer moving forward (something I cannot say about the last software I used, Beer Tools Pro).

 

[stamandster]

I use https://www.brewgr.com which seems to be the software behind what was brewtoad

 

[JoeyDVDZ]

I use BrewTarget. They stopped using the old web site and you can now get the updated versions here. Newest version is currently 3.0.10

Not sure if you're still using BrewTarget or paying attention to this discussion, but I've been trying to figure out how to import XML recipes from Brewer's Friend into BT, but apparently there's some discrepancies between the wording the two systems use in their XML that won't allow import into BT.

Any chance you might know how to fix the attached XML so it will import into BrewTarget? Thanks!

 

[Broothru]

Hate to even bring it up because it's long gone, but I still depend religiously on the dinosaur Promash. Does everything I want, long history with it, but I know at some point I may lose everything so poking around myself. Following with interest.

The first brewing software I used was ProMash, and I used it for quite some time until it was no longer being supported. Brad Smith had just created BeerSmith so I gave it a shot.

That was Ver.1, and over the years (at least 10, maybe 15) it has proven to be a very reliable one for designing, tracking and archiving recipes. I converted most of my ProMash ones long ago, and never looked back.

Dr. Smith does regular updates (now Ver.3 of the software), maintains a regular blog post, and quickly responds to even my most weird or convoluted questions. Great program.

 

[corncob]

I like a spreadsheet created by the brewer (me) tailored specifically to his equipment, process, and aesthetic taste, personally. In the smartphone era, it's a Google sheet with all my brews, plus a Google sheet version of bru'n water for me. I have no desire to build it the math for balancing ion concentration, but volumes, gravity, and bitterness are easy enough.

I used to do pencil+notebook.

 

[Zadkiel]

I only started brewing this year, and only did my first grain brew a few weeks ago, but when I was trying to create my first recipe I tried a few different popular online systems, and one stuck out far far better than all the others I tried. Brewfather.

1) It was newbie friendly, as someone making their first ever recipe it was the only one that I didn't get lost in, not requiring me to fill in data I didn't even understand what the word meant, let alone how to find. Maybe that makes it less flexible to more advanced brewers, I don't know, but in brewfather I had the recipe set up and working in minutes, in some of the others I just found myself saying 'what does that even MEAN?? I don't understand!'
2) It was completely up to date with profiles for malts, equipment, water etc. The malt database was a huge deal, in brewfather I could put in 4.2Kg of Weyermann Bohemain Pilsner and boom, all calculated - maybe I need to edit it to change EBC from 3.5 to 4 to match the batch I bought, but that's all. In beersmith I had to select a generic Pilsner malt and then edit it, find the specs of the malt I had, then edit the values to try and match it, not really understanding the specs and struggling with differences in terminology and values between EU and US - I just didn't have confidence in it being right at the end.
3) Simple and effective 1-button toggle from imperial to metric, no muss, no fuss, just change a settings toggle and it all 'just works'. It even changed the recipe to report colour in EBC instead of SRM, nice.

 

[JoeyDVDZ]

Thanks for that information. I just assumed that when the website for the old version didn't have anymore updates that it'd been abandoned.

I just took a quick look at the site you linked. Do you know if this is the original writer or team that wrote Brewtarget. Or did someone else pick it up to maintain?

I use Brewtarget too.

I've been trying to use BrewTarget, they're up to v 4.2.1 on the new iteration of the software, but there's not a lot of activity on their web forum in the github repository for it. Shame, it looks like a very nice piece of software.

Has anyone been able to figure out how to import the brewer's friend XML files into BrewTarget? I tried searching for recipes using the JSON format, but I've come up pretty empty there so far.

 

[BandonBrewingCo]

Brewfather is excellent. The best there is imo.

Rapt/Kegland have a new one out that is quite "similar" but not as fast but is much cheaper with automatic conversion of steps into rapt profiles which is a really cool feature.

If kegland can get rapt into a native app (not just a browser wrapped in an app) I'll probably dump brewfather for it.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

I've been trying to use BrewTarget, they're up to v 4.2.1 on the new iteration of the software, but there's not a lot of activity on their web forum in the github repository for it. Shame, it looks like a very nice piece of software.

The release history (link to 'home page' at github, link to release history tags) since v 3.0 (Sept 2022) suggests an active development community.

Honestly, I missed the transition of BrewTarget from brewtarget dot org to brewtarget dot beer. A desktop home brew app that has active development and is cross platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows) is worthy of a serious look.

Has anyone been able to figure out how to import the brewer's friend XML files into BrewTarget? I tried searching for recipes using the JSON format, but I've come up pretty empty there so far.

Are you having problems with XML imports into BrewTarget?