New Brunswick Craft Brewers Association
Uncategorized Boards => General => Topic started by: sdixon on January 01, 2012, 12:31:13 PM
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I'm curious... what brewing software do most of you use and is it fee or free? I use http://www.brewmate.net/. I think it works pretty good, but I haven't tried any others.
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I use beersmith. It's not free but it's pretty ubiquitous and easy to use :).
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Beersmith for me as well.
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Beersmith.
I think it's like $20
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$27.95. Well worth the money IMO.
http://www.beersmith.com/order/ (http://www.beersmith.com/order/)
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Beertools
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www.beercalculus.com (http://www.beercalculus.com)
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I'm also a BeerSmith user.
I did use StrangeBrew for a while. It's free and the java code base is open if you want tweak anything under the hood... but I wouldn't recommend it. It's pretty dated now and seemed to have a lot bugs and strange behavior.
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I use BeerTools, its a bit counter-intuitive to use, but quickly learned.
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I use our Brewblogger... but I still have to figure out mash out temp and / or sparge water temp...
OK so, I've also used Brewmate and Beercalculus. I like Beercalculus because it gives infusion temp for mash out. One thing bothers me a lot though, is how to calculate the temp of your sparge water if you don't want to do a mash out? As I understand it, the rule is to just not make your sparge temp more than like 170...
Brewmate, beercalculus and brewblogger don't give a temp for mash out, or a temp for sparge water if you want to sparge at like 168 - do you guys try to hit a specific temp when you sparge? Does beersmith or beertools give those temps? Will it also give infusion temps if say I wanted to do a protein rest as well?
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I just shoot for 166-168 in the sparge temp after adding the water to the mash tun.
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So you just keep adding boiling water until it hits 168?
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Nah I do a similar thing to what I do for the actual mash... kinda intuition now, I usually shoot about 15F higher than that for the sparge water (obviously, the amount of water relative to grain is important: less grain, less overshoot required; less mash temp, more overshoot required, etc).
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Brew,
1. the particulars will depend on your own system, but I do the same as Richard: I know I need approx 20 degrees F above the desired mash temp and about 17 degrees above the desired sparge temp, with adjustments made for grain mass, and from there fine tuning is rarely needed, but if so is done with either really hot, or really cold water in small amounts.
2. Sparge temperature needs to be hot enough to kill off the mash enzymes and cool enough to not extract undesirable flavours from the grain. I don't really know the upper limit, but the lower is about 168F. At boiling, water will extract bitter tannins from grain.
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Thanks - yeah mostly I've been doing a mash out first before sparging. Main reason is that beercalculus will give the mash out temp on the site, generally described as like a little over a gallon of boiling water to the mash for 15 minutes (to bring it to 168). Then I sparge - using hot water (like not hotter than 170, often less). I assume if I do a mash out, the sparge temp doesn't matter much as long as its not too high...
My problem is, if I wanted to skip the mash out, calculating the sparge water temp is a bit difficult for me as I haven't gotten a good handle on the various calculators out there that tell me what temp to heat the sparge water to (if skipping a mash out, then I often sparge 2 times with half the water in each one as my other boil pot is only 20L - until I rig up my new kettles), and I haven't taken the time to read through how to calculate it manually yet...
That's really why I'm wondering about beertools and beersmith - if they tell you what your sparge temp should be, and if they let you split up your sparge water into two sparges...
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Beersmith does do the temperature calculations for you, and you can have it split the sparge into multiple batches. They have a free trial if you want to play around with it.
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Sparge temperature needs to be hot enough to kill off the mash enzymes and cool enough to not extract undesirable flavours from the grain. I don't really know the upper limit, but the lower is about 168F. At boiling, water will extract bitter tannins from grain.
It's actually supposed to be hot enough to extract the maximum number of sugars and cool enough not to extract tannins... the denaturing doesn't really happen to alpha until 180F. Also tannin extraction becomes significant at 170, so that would be the upper limit.
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Also fwiw I've been thinking about getting beersmith or beertools... beercalculus is nice but it's a bit rough around the edges.
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Richard & anyone else, if you would like a demo of beersmith at the meeting this weekend, I'd be happy to bring my laptop.
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yes, please do,
I can do a demo fo beer tools too if people are interested.
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Would like that on both counts; get an idea for which I'd prefer to get :)
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That would be very cool - love to see a demo of both programs...
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I'll bring my laptop to show BrewMate. I quite like it... and it's free.
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So I replaced M$ Windows 7 with Linux (Ubuntu 11.10) today and had to change brewing software (I could run BrewMate in Wine I suppose). I was happy to see that Brewtarget was actually already part of the software for Ubuntu! Anyway, here is the link.
http://brewtarget.sourceforge.net/
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BeerTools works in Linux too btw.
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Chris - I didn't know that, thanks.
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I think Wine (windows emulator) is good at plain old windows forms stuff - so anything that's mostly plain GUI should be run-able in linux.
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Chris - I didn't know that, thanks.
Nice to see you abandoned MS though :mrgreen:
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Brewtarget is awesome!! Its the first Opensource brew software I've seen that can calculate the different mash steps for me - can include a protein rest, a mash out, whatever I want! Nice - thanks for the tip!
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Chris - Yeah, I have been using Linux on my desktop for years. Funny story, I recently bought an HP laptop (where I normally use brew software) that came with M$ of course, it had known issues with the touchpad drivers in Linux, so I held off until I could find a solution somewhere. There were lots of discussion/help forums on various distro sites and HP site and yadda yadda, with no real solutions. I couldn't find a fix, so I just went ahead and installed latest Ubuntu anyway (hoping I could troubleshoot it on my own). Sure enough the touchpad didn't work and had to use a external mouse. But when I went into mouse/touchpad "acceleration and sensitivity" settings were down to zero so I simply changed settings and presto, works fine:-) I posted on one lengthy discussion thread on the issue and I'm betting there are a few super Linux geeks that may be slightly embarassed they didn't find that fix;-) Kinda like the "is it plugged in?" end user mistake, lol.
Brew - I agree, so far so good on the Brewtarget software!
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I recently got an Ipad and ended up buying Ibrewmaster... I had heard good things from northern brewer.
Anyone use it or know anything about it?
Seems straight forward enough I guess...
Any other good brewing/beer apps for ipad?
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Beersmith is now available for Linux. I downloaded trial version and it works fine. A little slim on the grain options, but I guess I an always add them manually.
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There's an addons menu item in the File menu where you can add the Weyermann Malts if that helps.
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Chris, do you find Beersmith worth the $27?
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I see beer smith Lite in apps for Ipad... but no beersmith. and you cant create recipes with beersmith Lite...
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I do find Beersmith worth the money. It's not just a database of recipes for me, although that helps.
It's the calculations (water and temp), scaling of recipes, the recipe cloud, etc.
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broke down and bought it. Pretty slick software. There are a few things I don't really like already, but I imagine I'll have to submit functionality update requests with the company.
So far though, I'd recommend it.
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Out of curiosity, beside the ugly, clunky interface, what is it you dislike about it?
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A couple so far are:
1. I can't specify how many time I want to batch sparge...1, 2, 3, etc. so I need to take the total sparge water volume, and devide it by the number of sparges I do.
2. When formulating a recipe, the software calculates many things, like estimated ABV. It also estimates final gravity. This isn't really a bad thing, BUT if I stop fermentation before it finishes up itself, I get a lower ABV, but the software shows what it estimates, which can put the brew in a different style.
I ran into number two when inputting a recipe for an english special bitter I just brewed. The estimated final gravity pushed the ABV above the style....but I stopped fermentation above the estimate, and the fina ABV does fall within the style.
3. When inputting actual measurements, the style guide comparison chart still shows the estimated values, not the values I input, so the comparison chart is then considere inaccurate....to me anyway...I don't care what it estimates so much, I care more about what the actual values are.
That's what I've noticed playing with it for 30 minutes.
BTW, the iphone version app sucks. I can look at recipes, but no detail whatsoever.
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You can deal with the sparge volumes by editing the mash profile that you're using. If you restrict the % vol that you can use when sparging, you'll get the desired number of batches. You can do this for the profile globally from the Profiles tab, or per recipe by clicking the check mark on the mash profile in the mash tab of the recipe.
When you are stopping the fermentation, you are, in effect, manually determining the attenuation of your yeast. You can edit this per recipe by double clicking on the yeast in your ingredients list, or globally in the ingredients tab.
You are absolutely correct. All the mobile app is good for is getting the ingredients list out of the recipe cloud. Waste of money.
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Thanks for the info....now I know where to send my questions! haha!
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The software leaves a lot to be desired. It took me a while to really get the hang of everything. Overall, it's pretty powerful though.
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Pretty sure ibrewmaster addresses some of those concerns Fakr, i havent figured it all out yet ... It doesnt make much sense to get this now that you have beersmith but for anyone who is looking for a decent iphone or ipad brewing app, its worth it to check ibrewmaster out.
http://ibrewmaster.com/upload/iBrewMast ... e_1.45.pdf (http://ibrewmaster.com/upload/iBrewMaster_iPad_User_Guide_1.45.pdf)
... user guide for a slightly older edition but same thing
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That's great, I can manually set the attenuation of the yeast on a per recipe basis. I also got the batch sparge counts working as well...
I like the software so far.
I did notice with the iphone app that additional recipe information is available under the "timer" tab...not as much info as beersmith mind you, but enough to be useful.