I've been playing with a calculator I found on brewersfriend.com and am wondering whether folks here use a brew calculator to develop recipes. I've never done a homebrew and am studying as many aspects of it as I can before starting.
I use the BrewCipher spreadsheet, and recommend it if you have excel and want a free, fairly comprehensive brewing calc tool. Full disclosure... I wrote most of it, so don't go by my say so.
I use BrewCipher and Beersmith 2. I like the water calculator, and a few other refined things in BrewCipher, but I have alot of my recipes in Beersmith that I'm too lazy to input/transfer for the time being. Both work good once you dial them into your system. Take lots of notes early on in your process and refine each time.
I design recipes with brewersfriend.com and then enter all the info into the brewcipher to compare. Plus brewcipher has a better water sheet than the brewersfriend.
I'm in the same boat. I have used iBrewmaster for a few years now and have all of my recipes on that. But I now use BrewCipher to run the recipe for the actual brewing and change my iBrewmaster calculations to BrewCipher's numbers. I really just keep iBrewmaster around for ease of recipe saving and the timers. Also, BrewCiphers hop utilization curves, yeast attenuation calculator, ABV predictor, and ability to calculate sugar fermentability accurately make it tops.
Since you've never done a homebrew...then don't be worrying about calculators at this point. Brew a few a ready-made recipes. Your local home brew shop sells them as do the on-line shops. Learn the process then expand into recipe development.
Thanks, everyone for the info. Sounds like I'll need actual experience before I get too inventive. An experienced friend (and specialist in German styles) is going to be helping me with my first few brews so I will be using using existing recipes at first.
