Brewing software?

Chris Craig · January 03, 2012, 10:32:04 AM

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.

Richard · January 03, 2012, 12:18:34 PM

Quote from: "Kyle"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.

Richard · January 03, 2012, 12:19:53 PM

Also fwiw I've been thinking about getting beersmith or beertools... beercalculus is nice but it's a bit rough around the edges.

HappyHax0r · January 03, 2012, 01:12:12 PM

Richard & anyone else, if you would like a demo of beersmith at the meeting this weekend, I'd be happy to bring my laptop.

Kyle · January 03, 2012, 01:15:00 PM

yes, please do,

I can do a demo fo beer tools too if people are interested.

Richard · January 03, 2012, 03:19:02 PM

Would like that on both counts; get an idea for which I'd prefer to get

brew · January 03, 2012, 03:53:57 PM

That would be very cool - love to see a demo of both programs...

sdixon · January 03, 2012, 07:41:46 PM

I'll bring my laptop to show BrewMate. I quite like it... and it's free.

sdixon · January 09, 2012, 10:13:06 PM

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/

Chris Craig · January 09, 2012, 11:48:29 PM

BeerTools works in Linux too btw.

sdixon · January 10, 2012, 12:12:42 PM

Chris - I didn't know that, thanks.

Richard · January 10, 2012, 12:50:11 PM

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.

Chris Craig · January 10, 2012, 01:04:22 PM

Quote from: "sdixon"Chris - I didn't know that, thanks.

Nice to see you abandoned MS though :mrgreen:

brew · January 11, 2012, 09:23:33 PM

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!

sdixon · January 12, 2012, 07:27:32 AM

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!