Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

I would like some feedback on the relative merits of the computer programs for designing recipes and keeping records. Could you email me with your evaluation of the program you use?

David

I use Promash primarily for recipe development. It has a lot of nice features I use occasionally. I haven't tried the other ones out there as I got Promash a long time ago. I think there are several guys in the club that prefer Beersmith which I have never tried.

I tried both Beersmith and Promash and stuck with Beersmith. I thought the interface was more user friendly. Beersmith has an active forum, tutorials, and updates avaliable. Promash is like windows 3.2.

I think you can import Promash files to Beersmith now if anyone wants to try an upgrade.

I put together a spreadsheet, because I wanted to know what goes into the calculations, and I'm a cheap SOB. I'm always tweaking and adding stuff to it. It does the trick, but I'm sure the commercial ones are a lot nicer, and pretty cheap.

IIRC, the commercial programs have a trial period so you can play around w/ them.

There are so many out there now it is tought to choose. I actually now use BrewAlchemy for Mac because they have an iPhone version that I can just take into the brew room with me.

There are several advantages and disadvantages to each.
One thing I like about BeerTools as Tom states is they update it regularly. It also has a nice user interface.

Promash is a little less user friendly, however, has one feature I like that BeerTools does not. It devides the recipe from the session. Every time you brew it is different. This seperation allows for you to have a constant recipe but different sessions where you can alter the ingredients (for example if your effiicency does not work out right and you have to add some DME, or your mash temp is off, or if you have a different ingredient on hand that is not in the recipe you can make alterations to that session) this can be recorded. Then you also have notes sections for each session to describe different aspects of the session, how the mash went, boil, fermentation, tasting notes, ect....

That is why I decided to go with Beer Alchemy as it marries these to ideas it has a nice user interface and has the concept of the session. Plus it is mobile so I don't have to run back and forth to my computer and take hand written notes.

I bought Beersmith. It does what Jeremy was looking for in that you can easily can record brew sessions. This is an important feature for me as I plan to do a fair amount of experimentation.

Another feature that I like is recipe conversions. You can set up the info about your brew system, then enter a recipe that you find and it will scale the whole recipe to fit your equipment. I do a lot of small batches so this was very important. It can also convert all grain recipes to extract which is handy.

Other features that are nice, but I haven't really used yet: ingredient inventory, shopping lists, water profiles, and just about every calc tool you might need.