I'm looking for a good brewing software program. I'm leaning towards Beer Smith, but, would like to hear reviews and opinions. Thanks!
This spreadsheet is freaking awesome... BrewCipher Actually, it's mine, but it's the one I use, so that's what I'll recommend.
I use Beer Smith. But be warned, it's not exactly plug and play. It does take quite a bit of playing with it to learn it's quirks and set things specifically for your system and process. But it can be done.
Yeah, you need to mess with it for a while to get the jist of what you need to do. It's a bit over-complicated if you ask me, but it works very well, and I have no issue with the money I spent on it. Worth every penny. Here's a link that helps you to dial in your system to the software. If you go with beersmith, you'll need to dial in your system before you'll start getting accurate numbers. It's not real easy, but it's do-able. I have to do it again soon, when my new system is up, d'oh! My current system is spot-on tho. If you put the software on more than one computer, configure them at the same time, together. There's a lot of parameters, it's easy to have two versions that produce slightly different numbers if you don't pay attention.
I was old beer nut long before I got the nerve to Home brew. I bought Brewsmith before I bought my gear. I also bought many used brewing books. I was scared to death, but after watching many videos on youtube and seeing a few live ones, i jumped in. its the only way to learn...
True dat. It's tres important to collect brew-day data by taking good notes and measuring your various volumes to dial-in your process to BS or any other homeboy brewing software.
Really the bottom line is that beersmith's faults aren't that big a deal, and the functionality of the program more than makes up for the faults (there are a few things could could be improved on tho). You won't get quite the beer-geek level of functionality that Vikeman's spreadsheet gives (if you choose beersmith), but that may matter that much anyway. Beersmith is moderately plug and play, in that you can start using it right away to formulate recipes Dialing in takes time (and a few batches of beer, obviously), in order to set the system to matching to your computer. Once you're dialed in tho, you're pretty darn set with beersmith. If you prefer even more parameters than beersmith offers, or more of an exact control of how the math is done, well, Vikeman's spreadsheet once again comes to mind. These are probably the two most sophisticated tools on the market today for homebrewers, at least for all practical purposes for most of us.
