The result is a general book about home brewing that fails to cover any topic with any real depth, and barely mentions BeerSmith at all. There are a wide variety of topics covered, albeit in a somewhat haphazard fashion (the author admits this in the introduction) and the articles tend to jump around despite being organised into chapters. Instead, the book is a loose collection of selected blog posts from the BeerSmith blog. "Home Brewing with BeerSmith" is not a book about home brewing with BeerSmith. Perfect! With a title like that, you would think this book is about home brewing with BeerSmith right? Wrong. So I went looking for a book about home brewing with BeerSmith, and found "Home Brewing with BeerSmith" by the software's author Brad Smith. all of these affect your efficiency and the quality and predictability of the final beer.
Water profiles, mash profiles, whirlpool hopping, equipment profiles. Creating new recipes, or adjusting existing ones to suit your taste become simple with a tool like this.Īfter 3 years of working my way through the basics, I decided it was time to learn some of the finer points of BeerSmith.
It is great software and makes a lot of complex calculations much easier. It does have an inventory management feature, which BS has had for awhile, but if you want to get serious on that side of the business it is highly suggested to invest in a dedicated whole-brewery software such as Ekos, BeerRun, Orchestrated Beer, etc.įor the price though, its a great place to start until you identify where it doesn't meet your needs.I've been a home brewer for about 3 years now, and have used BeerSmith from the very first batch. This requires a feedback loop (getting your beers analyzed or in-house analysis) so you can make the program work for you and really rely upon its calculations.
You still have to update your alpha's, malt SRMs, and dial in the program based upon what you are seeing with the ingredients you see coming into your brewery and their performance on the brewhouse side. But ultimately, it's not going to do much for making your beer more consistent - that comes down to processes on the factory floor. The cloud support is attractive for us as we have a couple brewers collaborating on recipes, keeping ingredient specs up to date, etc and this helps us ensure we are all working in the same version of the recipe. Version 3.0 is the same program as previous versions, basically, with a few tweaks on the water profile side, updated ingredient lists, and better cloud support.
Plus, if you have a question about the program it is much more likely that their support team will field your questions if you are using the latest version. If you are going to rely upon it for a commercial brewery I'd highly suggest going with the latest version (vs downloading a previous version) as it is fully supported and able to receive current updates as they are released.
Beersmith is Beersmith, your experience in navigating the software, the menus, its capabilities, etc will be the same regardless of which license option you choose. The options for V3.0 you see available are all identical, there is no "easier to use version." What sets them apart is the subscription service and commercial licensing. For most small brewers it is plenty adequate for recipe development and storage. We've been using BeerSmith for 5+ years now and recently upgraded to the commercial option for version 3.0.