Beersmith 3.0

[Sadfield]

Just emailed you a few questions lol

Is there a water profile or style guide on there for a neipa. Couldn't find it

No there isn't, and the style guide is from 2015 so doesn't include NEIPAs. You can however create your own by clicking Ingredients > Water, then the the Add Water (teardrop) button to open the box below. Copy the numbers over or add your own if you have a better profile than this on.

 

[Hoddy]

This is what i currently use, based on the attached (below) NEIPA water profile and 0.5 ratio.

When you use BS make sure to see and account f0r the treatment of your mash and sparge water and that you enter it to get the right adjustment readings.

 

[dan125]

Is there a water profile or style guide on there for a neipa. Couldn't find it

There are some style water profiles on the water add-on, but not for NEIPA

 

[Leon103]

Thanks all. Just need the values for magnesium and bicarbonate. Can't seem to find them in my report

 

[foxbat]

It’s actually much much better. It now allows you to customise and record the recipe, water treatment, and all those bespoke elements. Specifically to each recipe rather than “generally overall”

This means you can record the actual development of a recipe, water mashing, water etc for a specific beer.

You could do that in 2.0. If you go to, for example your equipment setup in an old recipe it will be as it was and not change when you change global settings. Or did you mean something else?

 

[cheeseyfeet]

Bumping my earlier question -

Does anyone have any tips for using the new functionality to estimate bitterness additions from cube hops when no chilling?

I usually just count them as a 20 minutes boil addition but I'm not sure this is too accurate.

Any ideas appreciated!

 

[GerritT]

Question here, about BS3: did you purchase the standalone or the subscription version?

 

[cheeseyfeet]

Question here, about BS3: did you purchase the standalone or the subscription version?

I went for the gold subscription as I want to store more on the cloud for backup/mobile brewing with the app.

I don't think just over a tenner a year is bad for the value that i get.

 

[Sadfield]

Bumping my earlier question -

Does anyone have any tips for using the new functionality to estimate bitterness additions from cube hops when no chilling?

I usually just count them as a 20 minutes boil addition but I'm not sure this is too accurate.

Any ideas appreciated!

It's hard to say without knowing how long your wort stays above 79C. I would probably plump for whatever is shortest, time above 79C or 2 hours. At a mean temperature of 90c. I wouldn't imagine you'd get much isomerisation after 2 hours.

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[cheeseyfeet]

It's hard to say without knowing how long your wort stays above 79C. I would probably plump for whatever is shortest, time above 79C or 2 hours. At a mean temperature of 90c. I wouldn't imagine you'd get much isomerisation after 2 hours.

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Good shout - to be honest I think people (including me) obsess about these things when it's probably impossible for the average tongue to differentiate within a 10 IBU range!

 

[peebee]

What quickly turned me off v.3 is the very inflexible water treatment. Being able to exclude chalk is an improvement, but all the other water treatment salts are cut in stone and you can't add to them or modify the existing.

A major improvement to my water treatments was discovering Magnesium Chloride. Manipulating magnesium and chloride ions became a doddle. Using Magnesium Chloride has done far more to making water treatment easy than Beersmith has done so far (Bru'n Water includes Magnesium Chloride and introduced me to it). And then there is Slaked Lime to modify alkalinity, or even Potassium Bicarbonate (Bru'n Water don't have Potassium Bicarbonate either - slaked lime is a pain as it must be added to the dry grain and never directly to the water) - the assumption seems to be everyone wants reduce alkalinity, although there are quite a number of us who need to increase alkalinity. Why can Beersmith suggest adding bicarbonate and chalk to the sparge water - that is daft. And to top off my grousing you've got to put up with the spelling ("sulfate" rather than "sulphate", okay a minor grouse and I understand our well ingrained use of "ph" is likely incorrect?).

To be fair, there does seem to be something going on with the water treatment (you can add salts from the "water" tab, but they don't appear in the "water" tab) so possibly it is still "work-in-progress"?

 

[cheeseyfeet]

I'm struggling a bit with the new water features in BS3 also.

My brewday regime is to treat all of the water in the HLT, my water has basically nothing in it and I'll only add Gypsum and Calcium Chloride, so I just calculate how much to add to 40l in the HLT then mash in and sparge from there. I usually have some water left over in the HLT but salts are cheap so I'm not worrying about that.

If I'm doing a dark/stout then I'll add bicarb directly to the mash.

I can't seem to get BS3 working for this approach as it demands either mash or sparge salts and doesn't allow a combination. I'd like to tell it that I'm adding 12g of Gypsum and 3g of Calcium Chloride to 40l used for both mash and sparge.

The only way around this I can think of is to do my usual treatment of 40l, then work out the proportion of salts based on strike and sparge volumes , so I can add these as ingredients - too much like hard work!

Or maybe I can create several new water profiles that match my water + salts?

 

[Sadfield]

I can't seem to get BS3 working for this approach as it demands either mash or sparge salts and doeOr maybe I can create several new water profiles that match my water + salts?

This what I do. I have a range of custom profiles that also include the additions needed to hit that profile. When I have completed a recipe and know the total water volune required, I add my chosen water to the recipe and BS automatically adds the salt additions.



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[cheeseyfeet]

This what I do. I have a range of custom profiles that also include the additions needed to hit that profile. When I have completed a recipe and know the total water volune required, I add my chosen water to the recipe and BS automatically adds the salt additions.

Thanks Sadfield - I tried this but BS3 still just adds these from the water profile as mash salt additions, which throws off everything in the 'Adjusted Water profiles' section. At least this gives me the correct additions on the brew steps to help my preparation.

 

[Sadfield]

Ok, I'll watch out for that. I've not as yet created a new recipe in V3, only played around with existing ones. It's certainly a work in progress, and definitely requires some dialogue with Brad, as it currently looks geared to the American way.

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[Drunkula]

And to top off my grousing you've got to put up with the spelling ("sulfate" rather than "sulphate", okay a minor grouse and I understand our well ingrained use of "ph" is likely incorrect?).

Go to the beersmith directory (right click on the shortcut -> open file location) make a backup of Res.xml, then edit Res.xml and do a case matched search and replace and change "ulfate" to "ulphate". Save. I just did it to check. You can also do Misc and Water.bsmx.

Pretty much if it's not fully in caps you can replace it, so you could do a search and replace on all the xml and bsmx files with something like grepwin. EDIT: just did it an nothing is broken. Also change 'ulfite' to 'ulphite' and now have a Sulphite tool with sulphites.

If anyone needs a quick way of having all your recipes on the cloud then use dropbox and change the beersmith recipe directory to somewhere in that - File->Change documents directory. Do a backup first and save the backup file into dropbox. Then on a different computer change its directory to match the dropbox folder - thing is it'll overwrite the directory contents so if your other version didn't already have the same recipes then import the backup you saved - after that they'll always be in sync.

 

[Sadfield]

Nice tip @Drunkula. I haven't access to PC at the moment, but can this be worked for ingredients so my Inventory is live on two computers?

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[Drunkula]

but can this be worked for ingredients so my Inventory is live on two computers?

Yes, everything is mirrored. Recipes, settings, equipment profiles, custom ingredients you've entered...

Make sure you shut down each version before opening the one on the other computer because Beersmith saves out the files on exit, too. You could end up with conflicted copies of the files but I've never had it happen. Good thing is you wouldn't actually lose anything because you can either rename the conflicts or open, say, the conflicted recipe file and import a missing recipe from it - you're safe if you accidentally forget to do it.

EDIT: in case people haven't thought about doing this with dropbox (or other live sync progs) then you can also do things like create a symlinked directory junction into it for programs that don't let you do it, but will save settings in your user folder or within their own folder. Not going into it - just saying in case people hadn't thought of it.

I did do the same thing with quite a few other programs but Dropbox has file monitoring that works really quickly after a save and was much better with the sneaky tricks I was trying to pull with junctions and stuff.

EDIT AGAIN!: I'm going to be a cheeky git and give my reference link in case somebody hasn't got dropbox - you get an extra 500 MB for using it - and better still, so do I.
https://db.tt/pJ1WFIFHMD - it is delightfully free.

 

[peebee]

… EDIT: in case people haven't thought about doing this with dropbox (or other live sync progs) then you can also do things like create a symlinked directory junction into it for programs that don't let you do it, but will save settings in your user folder or within their own folder. Not going into it - just saying in case people hadn't thought of it. ...

'Sright. I've been doing this with free Googledrive for a while now. I'll move to Microsoft "Onedrive" (or more likely just use it as well) with everything else I sync (I don't consider it better, just I have tons of space there - 1TB, what am I going to do with that? 1TB is part of another paid for service - but they do have small free offerings). But "symlinked directory junction" perhaps aren't for everyone?

Good of "Drunkula" to bring this subject up: I discovered I haven't been syncing for a couple of months since a major upgrade of Googledrive! I'd been getting plenty of warnings but the implications hadn't sunk in.

And "Sadfield's" tip of creating water profiles already containing missing elements (like the Magnesium Chloride I was papping on about) would certainly help my complaints about v.3.

So v.3 paid for now - well it does fix some niggles I had with v.2 that wont be going away now, and I'm sure the niggles in v.3 will sort themselves out.

 

[Hoddy]

You could do that in 2.0. If you go to, for example your equipment setup in an old recipe it will be as it was and not change when you change global settings. Or did you mean something else?

More in that you have more flexibility to retain, store and customise your whole beer recipe and it’s production far better than you could in 2.0. Because all of those calculators are in built into the recipe tab rather than separate tools.


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