Brewtoad vs Beersmith, am I missing out?

[Blind Dog]

BeerSmith is pretty awful to use. It's so visually cluttered. Tabs on top of tabs on top of tabs. It may have options and all kinds of details but it shouldn't be on the user to wade through all that complexity to just design a recipe. If you're going to pay for brewing software like BeerSmith I feel that it should be properly designed in the first place.

Really? I make a Luddite look like an early adopter of new tech and find beersmith easy to use and pretty intuitive. Horses for courses I guess

 

[welly2]

For all Beersmith's ugliness, I've just spent a bit of time with Beeralchemy and that I'm finding a bit clunky even though it's more "Mac-like". I guess I'm used to Beersmith with all its peculiarities.

 

[Cervantes]

It's worth persevering and really getting to grips with Beersmith.

Once you dial in your equipment profile you can achieve great and repeatable results and generally hit your numbers every time. But you have to take records and get your equipment profile right.

I use Beersmith for recipe design and record keeping, but do use EZ Water or Brewer's Friend for my water calculations.

 

[Lowlyf]

With Beersmith 2, Can you use the program on multiple computers? I have a Desktop PC at home, plus a Mac Book Pro plus my work computer and my android phone. I have beersmith on my phone already but I am wanting to run it on all 3 of my computers. Anyone had success with this?

 

[zeggie]

With Beersmith 2, Can you use the program on multiple computers?

I managed to via a Dropbox folder but it was a PITA and wouldnt recommend it.

Ive been testing out Brewers Friend free trial and its tempting me to switch I must admit. So simple to use via multiple PCs, laptop, phone etc.

 

[Parks]

Dropbox works fine as long as you remember to close the application on each computer and allow Dropbox to sync before opening it on another.

Once I got in the habit of closing it religiously it works great.

 

[schoey]

With Beersmith 2, Can you use the program on multiple computers? I have a Desktop PC at home, plus a Mac Book Pro plus my work computer and my android phone. I have beersmith on my phone already but I am wanting to run it on all 3 of my computers. Anyone had success with this?

I run Beersmith 2 on 2 Macs and an iPhone with a subscription to Beersmith cloud. Works perfectly. Just make sure you save all your recipes to the cloud rather than locally, nothing more annoying than trying to lookup a recipe only to realise you saved it locally on another machine.

 

[Lowlyf]

I run Beersmith 2 on 2 Macs and an iPhone with a subscription to Beersmith cloud. Works perfectly. Just make sure you save all your recipes to the cloud rather than locally, nothing more annoying than trying to lookup a recipe only to realise you saved it locally on another machine.

What's the cloud cost ya?

 

[welly2]

What's the cloud cost ya?

I thought it was free. Don't recall paying for cloud.

 

[dicko]

I thought it was free. Don't recall paying for cloud.

10 recipes are free which will let you put a recipe on the cloud then store it in your devices or desktop pr you can pay $1.00 / month for a basic storage amount.

http://beersmith.com/blog/2012/04/25/beersmith-2-1-and-the-beersmith-recipe-cloud-a-preview/

That link was the info on introduction...it may have changed since then.

 

[rocketpants]

i use beersmith with dropbox and that works well enough. It took a while to get used to but is pretty easy once yu've set things up. There are a few good tutorials on beersmith web site and brulosphy.com has made a few vids which helped me greatly. the cloud function in BS is a PITA as i would like it sync my equipment, added ingredients, water profile, inventory and so on and sync over all my devices. but it doesn't. If i had my time again i'd probably go with brewers friend for its cos device sync capabilities.

 

[butisitart]

me on a learning curve with beersmith - only fed a few brews through.
love their database on ingredients, beer styles etc. got a bit overrawed by it's depth, but decided to work on one new facet when up for it. so not yet doing efficiencies, but just mastered hop balances. gets better as i go along. on the one side, i think it would be unusual if you could jump on and master it in one brew. on the other hand, if you don't try to take the whole thing on in one go, then the bits that you've got under control are really really good.
my one complaint (and it could be false cos maybe i haven't found the tool) is that it doesn't add the 0.5% ish alc for priming sugar. or maybe that's automatically in there.
but yeah - money well spent in any event.

 

[Nizmoose]

I have to put in a vote for brewtoad, after trying beersmith and really wanting to like it I found it just too clunky and annoying to use and not being able to swap inventory and recipes on the mobile app as easily as it could be is frustrating. I find brewtoad's ingredients database really good and whipping a recipe up seems a much less painful process on any device as its purely internet based. No messing with clouds or xml files or forgetting which recipe is on which device. Also the ability to write up a good brew log and keep them saved is great. IMO brewtoad is faster, simpler and much prettier (not that it matters too much) and when it comes to equipment profiles and numbers that's all written down for me separately and tweaked by myself.

 

[butisitart]

cloud is free. beersmith comes with licence for up to 2 stand alones - so if you network the stand alones, recipe database problem solved. and if you cloud them, solved anyway. you need the software on the 2nd stand alone if you're going to do stuff on that one.
mobile phone i haven't used, so no comment