I slimmer more trimmed style of report would be better for record keeping in my mind. The print out is fine, but it uses two pages. If you want a report to look at though you have to print it out. BTP only offers a text export feature that you can paste into word, or onto websites. I like to keep a binder of my recipes and my brewing notes for each batch. My second big complaint is that BeerToolsPro doesn’t generate a neat printable report for your records. However, that graph is rather unexciting if you just do a single infusion. A completed schedule does make a nice graph of the temperature and volume changes in the mash. It is not entirely flexible but you can get it to show what you intend to do in the brew house with some practice. I am a batch sparger, so first figuring out how to get BeerToolsPro how to appropriately do that was difficult. Which was helpful getting over some of the low points. There are extensive online forums at the BeerTools site that are useful too. (That would be an interesting experiment) You can also imagine how an American Amber beer and a German Altbier can come about with the same ingredients conceptually, but you would have to substitute German Hops and German yeast to make the beer actually taste the to style, but still use the basic recipe format. Information like that lets your think about how your beer is going to taste, and what mods are necessary to push an ESB into the IPA range. I made an ESB and noticed that my numbers were damn close to English IPA. What’s even cooler is scrolling through all the styles to see how your recipe compares. For instance, if you create a Brown Ale recipe, you can quickly see how it compares to the several different versions of Brown Ale. You can even scale the numbers based on your attenuation if you know what it is (maybe this is useful for a post brewing report).Ī very nice feature is a little subtle set of arrows that let you compare your recipe agains all the BJCP Style Guidelines. It takes a short time to get used to where to find everything, but it works very nicely. The most useful example would be updating your hops Alpha Acid rating. I think this is better than polluting your database with entry changes every time you get a new batch of malt. For example, if the English Chocolate Malt you pull out of the database has a Lovibond rating of 350, but your actual chocolate malt in hand is 300L, you can make an Edit in the recipe, not the database. You can easily adjust the properties of ingredients in the recipe without changing the entry in the database. I even made an entry for Johnnie Walker Red that I put in my Holiday Ale. I have already added some special ingredients like oak chips, a specific brand of vanilla extract and cocoa powder. The database is extremely easy to make additions too as well. The ingredient database is extensive and thorough. I use it to help guide questions I see in several online forums occasionally too. I have also used it several times to check calculations and make approximations about other peoples recipes that I find online. Converting some of my old recipes and using it to formulate new ones. I have used this software to formulate about 20 recipes thus far. Beersmith to me is that software.Not too long ago I posted an Irish Red Ale recipe I generated using BeerTools Pro, and I said I would post a review of the software once I had some experience with it. Find software that does what you want it to do and does it well and use it. You can buy the most "feature" packed software you can find, and when you can't figure something out you will loose interest in it and find something else. People ask me all the time about software, and I always tell them the same thing. When I brew on the weekends I want to be able to get it done, not look at screen after screen of information and still be confused. Promash has buttons to push to bring up yet another page! I can't comment on the reports because I've NEVER seen one! The eval edition will not let you! How do you know that you would like it?īeersmith has a LOT of information on the recipe view page, but it's all on one page. Promash appears to be set up for a touch screen at a brewery, neat feature, but useless to me, my laptop is no where near 5 gallons of wort, water, fire, rain, the two don't mix. It's hard to read on an LCD, and it is a little more complicated to use (not that Beersmith lacks any features, just easier to navigate) Beersmith is more user friendly than Promash. Well it does enlarge, but nothing really changes. You can't enlarge Promash to fit the screen. I use a laptop as my primary computer, the screen is set at 1024 x 768. I have to admit, I forgot the reasons why I didn't care for Promash, so I downloaded it again and now I remember!
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