[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BEdkZIUkvA4]
Several of us here at Hackaday Brew our own beer. Needless to say, we got a little excited when we saw members of the open source community building a brew tracking system. Brewtarget is an open source tracking system that you could download right now and begin tracking and building your recipes. It looks like there is a fairly active development group working on it and even a feature request form that seems to be filling up. Maybe we overlooked it, but there doesn’t seem to be an existing feature list. We look forward to seeing where this project goes.
Brewtarget implements BeerXML, which means it should also be compatible with Beershmith, a commercial application.
[via adafruit]
… and it installs itself under “Education” in the “Applications” menu.
Typo in summary, “Beershmith” (blame it on the homebrew!) :)
Don’t forget about BrewBlogger – a browser-based system for tracking your brewing.
http://www.brewblogger.net/
If the developers want the de-facto standard to use as a feature set reference, they should take a look at Promash.
If ProMash is working great for you, that’s awesome. It’s supposed to have good features.
For someone looking for app suggestions, I would _hesitate_ to suggest ProMash and caution them he app has not been updated in at least 13 years, and can be difficult for some to get running on Vista or Windows 7 or 64-bit Windows.
If someone has time to try all the brewing apps, there’s also QBrew for Qt based UNIX (possibly Windows also), QBrew development slowed considerably over the years. (I view Brewtarget as a response to that).
Shouldn’t be a problem, it was updated to fix the 64 bit OS issues… http://promash.websitetoolbox.com/post/Promash-dont-run-with-Window-7-64-bit-4410676
Honestly, All of these programs fall by the wayside for me. I keep a Brewmasters Recipie book and it works far better because when I go to the wierd side I dont have to deal with program wierdness. Like this program. try entering any ciders, you get a majillion errors.
Plus the last thing I want is any of my secret recipies locked into some program.. You can blow up my home and I’ll still be able to make beer in the woods as long as I have a carboy, bucket and pot.
“Locked into” is a bit of an exaggeration. These programs use BeerXML so recipes can be exported and imported back and forth. Also, you could just print them all out and keep them in a binder.
So all that’s needed is an interface to osPID and serial/usb controls to some solenoids for a three tier system and you’ll have some easily repeatable beers for those really good, but hard to reproduce recipes.
I like the setup overall. It looks great for someone that’s making the leap from kits to designing their own recipes but doesn’t want to be bothered with crunching numbers or neccesarily understanding all the minutia of recipe creation.
That said one huge improvement would be a searchable grain/hop database. I absolutely hate having to scroll through lists of ingredients. The use should be able to search for light munich, or maris otter just by typing it in.
As someone who enjoys all the minutia in recipe creation excel, the Malt chart wiki ( http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Malts_Chart ) and a good list of hop flavor profiles are cheaper/more fun than the brewing software I’ve seen so far. In a couple development cycles this could compete for my favor though.
It would also be nice if there was more options for those foraying into cider/winemaking territory. I found the program to be very much based around beer-making/brewing (which, to be fair, is probably what it’s supposed to be).
A simple spiral bound notebook will be more flexible than any software. I designed my own brew log sheet according to my needs and bound a book of them.
Care to share?
Also, what do you use for calculating things like IBUs and strike water temps?
There’s a misconception here that Brewtarget is a log, it can do that, but its main purpose is recipe design.
It allows you to scale recipes from one brewing system to another, hit IBUs. ABVs and colour targets, compensate for variations in ingredients/water type and check style guidelines.
It also acts as an ingredients database so you can look for viable alternatives when faced with a missing/unavailable ingredient often from a foreign recipe.
Its not meant to remove the joy and art from brewing, but to assist where that is wanted or needed.
I’m far more interested in getting my hands on the ingredients, playing with burners, sniffing stuff in hope and finally getting some beer down my neck than I am in fiddling around with a computer (which I do all day at work) but Brewtarget lets me get the boring artless stuff done quicker and accurately.