BeerSmith 1

BeerSmith 1.4 Features

NOTE: We recently updated our website and BeerSmith 1.4 Features

Please visit our new site to Learn More about BeerSmith 1.4

We are pleased to announce the release of BeerSmith 1.4 - a release that adds many new features to make your brewing session even better. A quick overview of the major additions are included below.

New BeerSmith Calendar

Organize and schedule your brewing sessions, major events and tasks on the new BeerSmith brewing calendar. Your recipes can be included as well so you can schedule your batch in time for a special event or date. Click on any item to view it or double click to edit the recipe, event or note.

Notes View

Create tasks, notes and events to remind you of things you need to do, upcoming brewing events and important notes you wish to capture. The notes view is fully integrated with the calendar, so your events and tasks can be shown on your brewing calendar.

Pricing Features

BeerSmith ingredients now each have a price field associated with them so you can estimate the price of your batches as well as plan shopping trips. You will need to do some work to set your own local prices in the ingredients database, but a pricing command lets you select multiple items and set the price all at once. Once the price of ingredients is correct, BeerSmith will calculate the batch cost as well as cost of your shopping basket.

Mash Adjustment tool

All grain brewers occasionally miss their target infusion temperatures. The mash adjustment tool determines how much hot or cold water to add to adjust your mash mixture. Just plug in the current conditions, target temperature and temperature of water you are adding (usually cold or boiling water) and this tool will tell you how much to add.

Lock or "Save As" a Recipe

There is nothing worse than accidentally editing your favorite recipe. BeerSmith now lets you lock recipes to prevent accidental edits. In addition the new "Save As" button lets you save changes as another name to prevent overwriting your original recipe.

Late Extract Additions

We have not left out the extract brewer. Many brewers add their malt extract late in the boiling process to reduce the chance of carmelization in the bottom of the brew pot. Unfortunately this can increase the bitterness of the beer (IBUs). Until now it was difficult to determine how much the bitterness would change, but under V1.4 we've added an option to allow BeerSmith to calculate the correct bitterness estimate for your late extract additions:

Improved Water Additions

The improved water tool lets you dilute your water additions to combine more than one water profile. In addition, you can save the ingredients you have added to a target water profile. Once you have additions set for a target water profile, simply adding that profile to a new recipe as an ingredient will allow you to add all the additions as well. This makes it much easier to store and use your water additions when you need a particular water profile in a recipe.

Customizable Brewsheets and New Tags

Many have asked for the ability to customize the step-by-step brewsheet so you can include your own formats or steps in your brewing process. The new brewsheet titled New Brewsheet on the format dropdown is fully customizable. See the custom reports page for more information on how to use the standard templates to create your own custom reports.

New recipe fields include: $YEAST_STARTERS, $WATER_PREP, $MASH_INGREDIENTS, $FIRST_WORT_HOPS, $STEEP_INGREDIENTS, $BOIL_INGREDIENTS, $STEEP_HOPS, $FERMENT_INGREDIENTS, $SPARGE_STEPS, $STEEP_TIME, $SECONDARY_INGREDIENTS, $PRIMARY_INGREDIENTS, $PRIMARY_DATE, $SECONDARY_DATE, $TERTIARY_DATE, $BOTTLING_DATE, $PRE_BOIL_OG, $COLOR_RGB, $DISPLAY_CARBONATION, $TOTAL_HOPS, $TOTAL_GRAINS and more

In addition you can now access subelements of a recipe such as $STYLE.NAME when making custom reports

Dozens of bug fixes and more

Dozens of bugs and potential issues have been corrected in 1.4. In addition a number of usability features have been added. For example:

You can now switch from metric to english and back from the main recipe view by just pressing Ctrl-m for metric or Ctrl-e for english
A boiling temperature was added to all decoction calculations to allow for decoction boil temperatures above 212F (100C), since decoctions boil at a higher point
Perceived bitterness index (defined as IBUs/OG points) has been added to recipe design sheet
Bar and Atmosphere measures have been added as pressure unit options
New yeast ingredients were added to the master database
New numbering was added to the style guide to allow addition of Australian style numbers
Images used in HTML templates can now be put in the templates directory, and no longer need to be in the windows temporary directory
AAUs are now displayed as total AAUS rather than AAUs per gallon
Shrinkage due to cooling is now in the boil off calculator
Bugs were corrected in the color estimation and conversion routines that should allow for easier automatic conversion of light colored extract and all grain recipes
Automated scaling of miscellaneous ingredients has been corrected
And many more...