11

I'm looking for brewing software that helps with record-keeping, calculations, inventory, and/or recipes. Across any platform (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux), what brewing software is available, and what are the pros and cons of each?

2

12 Answers 12

6

BeerSmith is an excellent brewing software. It offers easy to understand recipe creation and a brewday instruction sheet. It also allows for different equipment setups. Recipes generally follow style guidelines.

5

Take a look at BrewBlogger.

According to developer:

BrewBlogger is a web-based alternative to software such as BeerSmith, ProMash, and others.

I'm busy giving BrewBlogger a try now and I'm pretty impressed.

In the commercial space, BeerSmith is quite popular as is ProMash.

There are quite a few available in the open source space but the only one that I've used is BrewTarget (Windows, Mac and Linux)

3
  • I'm a fan of ProMash, though it is Windows only and doesn't seem to have had much development in recent time.
    – Tim
    Nov 17, 2010 at 7:47
  • I love brewblogger, it works great for both the clubs I'm in. Nov 17, 2010 at 17:01
  • BrewBlogger seems overly complicated. There are much simpler "web-based alternatives". I wasn't a huge fan of BrewTarget either... but it a good free alternative to BeerSmith. Mar 10, 2011 at 15:46
5

BeerCalculus is really nice to put your recipes together. Since it's a web app, it's platform agnostic. I don't believe it does anything like inventory management. I've used BeerSmith in the past, and it's really nice and worth the money if you need inventory management.

2
  • +1 for BeerCalculus. It's also nice because you can store all of your recipes online and access them from anywhere.
    – RobM
    Nov 17, 2010 at 16:54
  • +1 I've recently become a very big fan of this site. Love that it is a web app, and it is dead simple to use for creating, storing, and sharing recipes. Mar 10, 2011 at 15:40
4

I use BeerAlchemy (Mac/iPhone only), and it does pretty much anything I need, including keeping track of inventory. The iPhone version is really neat, and syncs to the Mac-version. The only thing I miss is listing batches by date, I use a spreadsheet on Google Docs for that.

1
  • While I think BeerAlchemy is a decent program, there are just some things about it that drive me nuts: only being able to view calculator at a time, calculators do not keep state when toggling between them, not being able to adjust the process of a batch once the parent recipe is defined, etc... It's better than a notebook, but i recommend it as an OSX app with reservation. Although, the iPhone syncing is pretty cool :)
    – gthmb
    Nov 19, 2010 at 23:37
4

I can't say enough about BrewPal! iPhone app (which is great because I don't brew in front of my computer). Only $0.99! Built in mash (fly, batch, decoction, partial, or steep) and boil timers (so I can enjoy as many homebrews as I want and not forget to add the 15 min hops, irish moss, or wort chiller...).

I'm a developer and was going to write my own just to learn how to write iPhone apps and learn about all of the math that can go into brewing, but this just did everything I was hoping for and more that I never wrote it. Maybe write something similar for Android.

Doesn't have inventory management features but I'm not that advanced anyways.

1
  • Both I and a friend in my brew club both use BrewPal and are impressed with the quality, especially now that it allows you to customize grains.
    – Mlusby
    Nov 19, 2010 at 19:08
2

I have used BeerTools Pro quite successfully on Windows. They have a free web-based version on their site as well, but it limits the number of ingredients you can add and lacks the mash schedule calculator which I used quite a lot.

I stopped using it so much when I moved from a Windows laptop to an Ubuntu laptop and found that BeerTools doesn't run under Wine.

1
  • Another vote for BeerTools Pro. I run it on a mac, and switched to it after using BeerSmith previously. I find it to be very accurate for my process, and provides all the tools I need.
    – Carson C.
    Mar 8, 2011 at 23:56
2

Brewtarget, Open source software, allows you to create, scale, and add notes to recipes, ingredients ..etc

you can use it on mac windows and linux, or if you want build from source on your solaris machine.

For me I sync the Database on several machines using Dropbox, but you can use almost any file sharing service to keep your changes synced up on multiple machines.

http://www.brewtarget.org/

1

If you're brewing wine, take a look at Fermsoft's Amphora software. They also offer an online wine-brew logging system which I've just started using.

1

I asked a similar question on BrewAdvice.com the other day:

Is there an online equivalent of Beer Smith?

Specifically, I asked about online applications, because I'd much rather use a web application then a desktop application.

One that was mentioned in that thread that was not already mentioned here is http://brewershub.com/. I haven't had a chance to play around with it extensively, but it looks nice and it appears to have a rich set of features. It sounds like it was just launched recently. Maybe one more to check out!

EDIT: After looking at this more, it looks like it DOES let you enter recipes, but it doesn't appear to do any calculations for you, which is a little lame. However, it looks like it does allow you to import BeerXML files, which are generated by programs like BeerSmith, so I guess you could create a recipe in BeerSmith and import it here.

1
  • Hi Jason, I am one of the developers/homebrewers behind brewershub. We just launched a new recipe builder: brewershub.com/recipe_builders/new that should cover some of the issues you reported with calculations. There is a link to a demo video right on our homepage. We are definitely looking for feedback as this is a brand new site and system and we are trying to make this as useful for brewers as possible. PLease give it a shot and let me know what you think. Looking forward to your feedback.
    – tomcocca
    Jan 2, 2011 at 15:30
1

http://www.brewersfriend.com/windows/

For Windows. It's free, easy to use, uncomplicated. I like being able to enter recipes by percentage too.

0

Check out http://www.brewernauts.com/

I just made this in the last couple months, it has calculations, exporting/importing, recipes, ingredients, and a historical brewing log of each beer you brewed and how it differed from the recipe you were attempting to follow.

1
  • This seems to be defunct.
    – Nemis L.
    Oct 1, 2014 at 7:56
0

ProMash runs under Wine, if that qualifies as running in Linux.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.