Anyone Using Brewfather?

I decided to look at Brewfather, as I needed a simple way of converting recipes. It seems ok, very simple to import recipes and it seems easy to use!
I have BeerSmith 2 & 3 and to be honest I don’t use it to its full potential!
But I do find it more “clunky” to use.

 

Beersmith or Brewfather?

I find Brewfather much simpler to use and ended up buying a year subscription. Very happy with my decision too.

 

Sorry Beersmith, I found Brewfather far easier

 

Does Brewfather have Tilt integration?

Cheers

 

Yes, it has Tilt integration and I have an iSpindel and it integrates really well with that also. You can see a chart of gravity and temperature for your brew in Brewfather for your current fermenting batch, very cool. Never in a million years would you get this with Beersmith.

 

I am a novice all grain Brewer, and was looking for software to design and track my brews. I played with a couple, including Beersmith which looked like it was from the '90's and didn't sync across all my devices as well as I'd like.

I tried Brewfather on the weekend. I like it. The author appears to be active and engages regularly with users on his Facebook page, providing advice and taking on suggestions.

I've paid for the premium subscription, and this will be my software.

 

I'm looking forward to see if the brewfather software will support the smart pid. Davide from smart pid is working on integrating it. Once the recipe had been created you then send then mash profile and hop schedule to the smartcpid and it's programmed.

If this happens I'll definitely switch to brewfather.

 

will have look at..got (Free)brewers friend and not liking it wants heaps of info before you start...and not very australia (grain)

 

Yep, I found exact the same thing. I'm a novice so I'm still trying to figure out all the types of grain and it's a bit confusing for me. Brewers Friend didn't have the grain I could get locally. Brewfather has Joe White, which I can get at my LHBS, so that was another thing that supported my decision to go with it.

 

I've been using Brewfather for a few months now after having used Beersmith for several years and there's no way I'll be going back to Beersmith. I really like the layout, it's much more user friendly and also like being able to easily adjust recipes on my phone during brew day without having to pay extra.

For anyone who is thinking of upgrading to premium, which is pretty cheap at the regular rate, they've got 20% off until the end of December.

 

Is there a way to change it to a no chill batch? I.e. Recalculate ibus based on extended times above isomerisatiin temps?

Does any brewing software offer this?

 

Yes - adding a hopstand addition will recalculate your boil additions ibu's based on the length of the hopstand. If you cube hop then use an approximation (I tried a hs addition at 80C for 20 minutes which seemed ok with my system). If you don't then you probably need to fudge it by adding a dummy addition of 0.1g or a custom 0 AA hop for the same or similar temp / duration to trigger this calculation and indicate how quickly/what temperature you dump to the cube.

 

Awesome, sounds good will mess around with it...

 

I had a fiddle around with Brewfather yesterday to see what it was all about. Seems generally pretty good but I could not find a way to add 'top up water' to my equipment profile. I have a grainfather (and a robo brew) that I use for slightly concentrated batches. Between the two I get around 53L into my ferm and I topup with 6L water for a 59L combined batch. In beersmith there is a section for topup water so that the software takes into account the final 'watered down' batch size and adjusts my hops calc to ensure target IBU will still be reached after dilution. In Brewfather I can turn off 'auto calc boil size' and put 'batch size into ferm' value but I'm not sure this is correctly compensating. Feeding in my standard recipe the IBU value comes out 24IBU in Brewfather but was 22.2 in Beersmith. Has anyone used Brewfather with this requirement? Apart from that, Brewfather seems very simple and easy to use for the reasonably basic recipes that I make. Certainly worth checking out.

 

In your recipe, go to Edit Equipment, then try adjusting the Mash Volume Limit (Max), and also the Sparge Water Limit. After you do that, go back into your recipe, scroll to the bottom and have a look at the way it changes the volumes in the Water section.

I'm no expert, but see how that goes.

 

Calculating late additions for no chill is a bit of a dark art, and hard to get from brewing software as there are a lot of variables (cube volume, wort temp, type of hops, ambient temp etc).

Best way is a bit of trial and error to work it out for you're gear and cube sizes.

Most people calculate the IBUs added from cube hops/late hops as somewhere between a 10-20 minute addition.

FWIW, when I make a hoppy beer I put in a bittering addition at 60 minutes (with about 20-30% of the total IBUs), then put a huge cube hop addition to make up the rest of the IBUs + the flavour. I calculate it as a 15 minute addition, and it works brilliantly for my setup (old 17L fresh wort kit cubes). Great smooth bitterness and amazing late hop character.

The other option is do a mini boil with about 5-10L of wort and use that for your late hops (search for Argon's method). You can rapidly chill the wort in a sink of iced water, the strain the cooled wort into a fermenter with the rest of the cubed wort.

You should be able to nail down what works for you in no more than 2-3 brews.

JD

 

Sounds interesting. Hope they release an offline app. I like brewers friend for its simplicity but more local grain options would be good. Some of brewers friend yeast attenuation numbers are a bit whacko too.

I do allot of my tinkering on my commute where there is no phone coverage for a long while. Online only is a bust for me.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave this a go but I'm not sure if it really achieving the purpose. When I try this it simply uses the largest mash volume possible, plus max sparge and then whatever is left becomes top up water. It does not seem to affect IBU calculation and it feels a bit 'hard wired'. What I was looking for was for the software to still advise the correct mash volume, sparge volume etc for the recipe, but understanding that my final batch size is larger than max values of my equipment and so to put the rest as top up water and calculate IBU accordingly. Using the hardwired method it was suggesting I use a 27L mash for about 4.5Kg of grain.
I did play around with this in quite a few ways, but I could not get a result where it seemed to be utilising the concept correctly as it does in Beersmith. I do appreciate you going to the trouble of providing screenshots etc, but with my fiddling around I haven't been able to get it to play ball.

My scenario if anyone is interested was just a basic recipe of 4kg trad malt, 200gm crystal and 200gm light munich - all joe white. I know from Beersmith that if I add 18gm Superpride @13.9%AA that I should get 22.3 IBU in a 29L batch using grainfather as equipment, set with 3L fermenter topup in profile. That is with 15L mash and 18.5L sparge suggested from bsmith. In this scenario the top up water would be 3L. I do this with a robobrew also so total top-up for both in the final 58L batch becomes 6L.

 

No worries, I'm still new to pretty much everything, so I'm not 100% sure of everything it's telling me.

Try asking the Dev (Facebook link below). He seems fairly responsive.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/brewfather/?ref=share