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. Either way, as long as people give the percentages, IBU and the OG anf FG it's not hard to plug a recipe back into whatever software you choose and replicate it failry accurately.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. I personally like the interchangeability of Promash as it seems as though most brewers on the west coast seem to use Promash, depends on what the people you're pinching recipes from use I guess. Unfortunately both Promash and Beersmith have their short comings, It's probably actually better that you understand the maths, so that if a program has a bug/glitch you're more likely to spot it. Both should explain the maths behind the program. I'd recommend buying a copy of John Palmers 'How to brew' or Ray Daniels 'Designing great beers'. Pmolou > Google is your friend, if you search around you'll find there's a dozen or more sites with all sorts of Excel spreadsheets that replicate the information in Promash/Beersmith without all the fancy GUI. I don't think I'd be willing to spend $$ on it anymore given the lack of support, but then it comes down to how often you use that support I guess. I've since found that the support for Promash is somewhat lacking, something that annoys me slightly as it's in the 5 pieces of software that I have ever actually purchased. I downloaded trials of Promash and Beersmith, the old school Windows user in me bought Promash, Beersmith just had too many menus for my liking. AFAIK both programs do the same thing, they just have different ways of doing it. As Aaron mentioned, this has been covered a few times before and in the end it's really a personal choice.
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