Beer Style Calculator

[BDC]

Hi gang,

I am yet to brew my first (drinkable) beer - that adventure starts next week.

In the meantime I thought I would share a little spreadsheet that I just whacked together after trying to find the best match for my planned brew on BeerSmith. Clicking through each style and squinting at the little bars was a tad tedious.

I found an old thread on here basically confirming that you can't "auto-select" a style in BeerSmith to find out what your mongrel brew is. The general consensus was that you can in some other app or you'd have to build your own. So I did. And here it is.

It's pretty straight-forward. Just plug in your OG, FG, ABV, IBU and SRM on the "Input" worksheet and it will tell you the "best-fit" style for the provided metrics. Obviously this ignores a whole bunch of other factors like fruit additions and so on, so don't take it as gospel The style guidelines were taken from BJCP, although may be a bit out of date as the Excel file I started with had an old date on it (can't remember how old). These can be updated / modified in the "StyleGuideline" worksheet.

If you are brewing something not matching any of the normal styles you can increase the "Style Variance" value which basically extends the upper and lower limits of all factors on all styles then calculates a best-match rating for all of the styles it encounters.

Feel free to update / add / amend / share as you wish. This is completely open source.

BDC

View attachment BDC_StyleGuide.zip

 

[nosco]

Nice idea. I actually thought that thats how BS worked when I first started brewing. I gave it a crack with my American Wheat recipe and it came up as an American Pilsner so pretty close. Some styles would be harder to nail down than others.

Edit: I hope your going all grain and not extract.

 

[BDC]

Hi nosco,

BeerSmith did give me a guide after my initial bill was entered, but I had to make a few tweaks (couldn't get all of the ingredients so did some subs, a bit of creative license etc) and the recipe simply fell further and further out of the style guidelines. What was a Saison soon became a "Special/Best/Premium Bitter (English Pale Ale)". This appears mainly to be due to the fact that I aimed for a lower ABV to make it a bit more sessionable.

Anyway, it was a bit of fun to make and will hopefully help someone out somewhere down the track.

And yes, going all grain. Veteran member D!CKO from AHB is coming over next week to get me started.

BDC