Brewing software?

[sdixon]

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.

[HappyHax0r]

I use beersmith. It's not free but it's pretty ubiquitous and easy to use .

[Chris Craig]

Beersmith for me as well.

[pliny]

Beersmith.
I think it's like $20

[Chris Craig]

$27.95.  Well worth the money IMO.

http://www.beersmith.com/order/

[Ian Grant]

Beertools

[Richard]

www.beercalculus.com

[Hawoh]

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.

[Kyle]

I use BeerTools, its a bit counter-intuitive to use, but quickly learned.

[brew]

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?

[Richard]

I just shoot for 166-168 in the sparge temp after adding the water to the mash tun.

[brew]

So you just keep adding boiling water until it hits 168?

[Richard]

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).

[Kyle]

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.

[brew]

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...