Beer Smith, Beer Tools, Pro mash, Beer Engine?

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dandan

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Which one is the best??

I'm looking at getting some brew softwear, to design and log my own brews on.

I've got a trail of Beer tools (15 Days left to go) and am quite impressed, I tried promash and it seemed to complicated! How are Beer Smith and Beer Engine to use?
 
I found beer engine a little clunky but the price is right. If you're running a mac you can add BeerAlchemy to the list.

I'm a bit of a nerd and like recipe calculation which is my excuse for not finding any of them particularly interesting. With the resources available on here I'm beginning to wonder why you'd need one.

The one thing apparently missing from all programs is a clever 'suggest a recipe' button based on your current inventory and brew length. There are such tools on the web for cocktail makers (you put in what ghastly tasting muck you have and then can print out a bar menu of all the cocktails you can make with what's in your cupboard) so a nicely coded algorithm is already known, it just hasn't been used. It would be a great feature as we often see people asking what they could brew next with what they have available to them. If no recipes were found you could have a ranked list of suggestions requiring one ingredient, then two, or substitions for hops. You could check a box for whether you were worried about sticking to the yeast strain, or brew length as well.
 
dandan said:
Which one is the best??

Have you considered using our recipe/database tool?

ano said:
The one thing apparently missing from all programs is a clever 'suggest a recipe' button based on your current inventory and brew length.

I have a list of possible new features for our recipe tool and that is near the top of the list - not hard to do really :thumb:
 
eskimobob said:
ano said:
The one thing apparently missing from all programs is a clever 'suggest a recipe' button based on your current inventory and brew length.
I have a list of possible new features for our recipe tool and that is near the top of the list - not hard to do really :thumb:
Good to hear! I've never aired such views before/elsewhere because secretly wanted to make it myself, but never really got much further than simple I/O programming in C++ and didn't get much further in python. I know there's a little bit of programming talent and mind sharing it a lot less on here =) but as you've already had the idea i can't claim any credit =(
 
I personally use Beersmith and you can set this to only show recipes that you could make from the ingredients you have in your inventory, it's very useful. I also find it very handy for recording the recipes I've done and I can rate the resulting beer and if ever I wanted to repeat a brew I can go back and look at my notes and see if I need to make any changes to the original recipe.
 
ano said:
Good to hear! I've never aired such views before/elsewhere because secretly wanted to make it myself, but never really got much further than simple I/O programming in C++ and didn't get much further in python. I know there's a little bit of programming talent and mind sharing it a lot less on here =) but as you've already had the idea i can't claim any credit =(

In order for it to work well, there really needs to be quite a few beer recipes in the database hence the main reason for not including it initially when there were no recipes to search.
 
I use StrangeBrew (java). Its pretty good for just knocking up a recipe, and the best part is it is free and downloadable from source forge. :thumb:

The only real problem is that is seems to be a dead project.
 
I've been a promash user for years (Since version1 IIRC), and see very little reason to change. . . . I rarely use promash for formulating a recipe which I do in my spreadsheet which has the formulas tweaked for my brewery, but once formulated it goes into promash for record purposes. I also like the calculators . . . The only thing about promash now is that there has been no development for years . . . which may or may not be considered a bad thing.

I like the way TBE approaches recipe formulation, and will often knock up a quick recipe in that if I am in a hurry . . . its just too much of a work in progress to really use, and the development path/effort is sporadic . . . but then it was just for Graham Wheeler to formulate the recipes for his last book
 
I tried Promash and quite liked it and it was a bit of a coin toss to decide whether I'd buy that or Beersmith and Beersmith won.
 
Well it was between Beertools and Beersmith, and i've gone for Beersmith, I like the inventory idea, it seems simple to use, Not as fancy as Beertools, but after trying both beerSMITH won!

For $21.95 usd (£13.68) its good value I thinks!! :thumb:

edited due to me getting muddled up!
 
Well after that I'm still confused which one you gone for??
Beersmith you've gone for.
Beertools won.
 

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