Many homebrewers are not aware of how brewing software can dramatically improve the quality and consistency of their home brew. Brewing without doing the math is kind of like shooting darts blindfolded, and software makes the math much easier.   This week, we take a look at some of the ways brewing software can make a difference in beer design and how it can improve your brewing day.

Now as a disclaimer, I obviously am affiliated with BeerSmith brewing software, but even if you don’t choose our package, I highly recommend you try the various beer brewing software programs available and select the one that suits you best.  Your beer will be better for it.

1. Design Great Beer in Minutes – Building a recipe with beer software is as simple as picking the ingredients you want from a list. A typical package has several hundred varieties of hops, grains, yeasts and more that are pre-entered for your use.   Picking from a list of ingredients is much easier than thumbing through a set of reference books.
2. Brew Consistently Good Beer – By tracking your ingredients, recipe used, original gravity and taste of your beer you can improve your brewing process and make more consistent, better tasting beer.  You can keep track of old recipes, see how changes affect your color, gravity and bitterness, and design better beers.
3. Brew the Style you Want – Brewing software lets you select a target beer style and match the color, bitterness and suggest ingredients as you build the recipe.  As you add ingredients, the software estimates each of these and lets you compare the current values to the style you selected.  This will help you come much closer to your target beer style the first time out.
4. Share Recipes – Brewing software that supports open standards like BeerXML give you access to thousands of recipes online that you can download, import and customize to your taste.  Many of the popular packages have dedicated recipe sites available.  You can also email recipes to your friends, post them on a web site or share them in a variety of formats.
5. Get Step by Step Instructions – Software like BeerSmith will generate step-by-step instructions customized for your recipe, equipment and methods. No fuss, no worries.  After you enter your recipe you can get specific brewing instructions generated by the program with a single click.
6. Stay Organized – Keep all of your brewing records in one place. Keep a brewing log of your past brewing sessions, schedule your next brew, record new ideas and manipulate recipes from the web.  Refine your favorite recipes to perfect your brewing technique.
7. Match your Brewing Equipment – The equipment you use to brew has a huge impact on the taste of your beer. With brewing software you can set up your equipment settings once and apply that to any recipe to get accurate calculations and estimates.
8. All Grain Made Easy – Modern equipment and ingredients have made all grain brewing more accessible than ever.  Infusion mashing for all-grain brewing involves a fairly complex set of calculations to determine the amount and temperature of water to be added at each step. In BeerSmith, you just pick the infusion profile you desire and the software provides detailed instructions that match your equipment and ingredients.
9. Manage Inventory, Track Prices and go Shopping – The best brewing software includes tools to manage your inventory of ingredients, determine the cost of each brew and even generate shopping lists for a particular recipe for your next trip to the store.  This makes it much easier to keep track of what you need and avoid those “extra trips”.
10. Software Costs Less than a Batch of Beer – Brewing software is cheap– typically from $20-25 for the top commercial packages. One bad tasting batch of beer costs more.

Want to try brewing software yourself?

• Learn More About Brewing Software
• BeerSmith Brewing Software – Download a free trial
• Other popular packages include Promash, BeerTools and Strangebrew

Thanks again for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  We appreciate your continued support, and will return to our regularly schedule beer brewing articles next week.

• Beer Recipe Design
• Converting All Grain Recipes to Malt Extract
• BeerSmith Blog Second Anniversary
• All Grain Beer Brewing With An Infusion Mash Setup
• BeerSmith Software Video Tutorials