The Bar Towel

I know this stuff has been discussed before, but I didn't find much with the search. It'd probably be good to put it all in one spot anyway.

Here's a few reviews:
http://beerandgarden.com/2012/03/brewin ... -brewmate/

Beer Alchemy and Beersmith were the only one's I've heard of. Anyone using Brewmate, iBrewMaster or Brewtarget?

Of course there's also:
http://www.promash.com
http://www.tastybrew.com

I'm still playing with BeerTools and then using some other stuff for better calcs:

http://realbeer.com/hops/bcalc_js.html
http://www.brewheads.com/calc.php
http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml

I just dl'ed BeerMate. I have used ProMash for a few years, but the lack of updates is frustrating.

BeerMate looks pretty good so far, but I am going to verify thir numbers against the BJCP site, as they have the naming off for the Scottish 60/70/80.

Thanks Derek, this might just be what I need.

For those with iOS devices, I use Brewpal ($.99), Spargepal (free), MrMalty pitching rate calculator (a few bucks on the iPhone, but free online). Also handy to have a metric to imperial converter, there's one called Handy Converter that works well. Brew Pal is pretty simple compared to ProMash, but you can get a good idea of colour, IBU, estimated gravity, strike and sparge amounts

Oh yeah, I forgot the awesome http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html (I only use it when I'm doing something really different).

i want the holy grail of brewing software: reads my old promash files and works on desktop, android, and iphone...

I use Brewtarget 1.2.3 (think 1.2.4 is now available) Works quite well and the price is right, and you can import BeerSmith recipes in xml

Found this which converts promash recipes to beer XML

http://outofkey.com/promash-file-converter/

Just run it against a directory and will convert all the files it finds.

xocoatl wrote:Found this which converts promash recipes to beer XML

http://outofkey.com/promash-file-converter/

Just run it against a directory and will convert all the files it finds.

hmm, that might work... i had hacked up a converter that worked on the .txt export of promash files, but having something that goes from .rec to xml would be nice. now to try and convince him to do the same for brewing session files

might be time to do some exploring and see what i can get that'll all use the xml format, even if it's different software on each platform.

grub wrote:i want the holy grail of brewing software: reads my old promash files and works on desktop, android, and iphone...

Are you giving up on promash just because of the portability?

(I thought it was lacking on the fermentation side of things).

There is an option on the convertor to enable conversion of session files too:

/processSessions[+|-] Would you like to convert the brewing session files as well as the recipes. (short form /p)

Now just need to figure out how to set a default directory for data files in some of these programs.

Right now we have things setup between 3 of us who brew together so promash is loaded into a dropbox shared folder. That way we can all see any updates to inventory, recipes, sessions, etc.

Dropbox also keeps backups of changes if we ever need to roll back because we messed up a file or something.

Derek wrote:Are you giving up on promash just because of the portability?

(I thought it was lacking on the fermentation side of things).

yeah, mostly... i have no real complaints about promash functionally, it's just windows only and i don't really have a windows box anymore. it works but looks like garbage under wine, and it would be really nice to have something i can access from my phone too (android) and i suspect eric's (iphone). at the same time, i've got 6+ years of recipes/sessions in promash format that i'd like to still have access to.

what do you mean by fermentation? it's definitely lacking ingredients, but i hack those in as-needed (probably less than accurately). other than that it works ok for me.

I've only played with the free Promash version once, and it was a while ago, but I remember having an issue with the yeast attenuation and gravities.

i've been using BeerSmith and I'm not sold on it. not sure why i feel this, but i feel like its a bit clunky.

anyone have a software preference? i'll likely be using it on Mac vs PC

For gravity calculation, I always look to this website:
http://realbeer.com/hops/kcalc_js.html

I downloaded Brewtarget last night, and started to mess about some. So far so good. Free, useable for PC and Mac, as well as Linux. It also imports .xml files.

http://brewtarget.sourceforge.net/