Recording Your Brews - What Do You Use?

[sosman]

Now that I have officially launched it on sourceforge, I may as plug what I use.

Brewsta

Don't chuck out your cracked versions of Pr0mash just yet it is what I call alpha software, but hell, it works for me.

The recipes I have brewed with it so far are online:

http://brewiki.org/brewsta/recipes/

and I am brewing again today (more tweaks to APA recipe).

cheers

 

[Barry cranston]

Good Day Sosman
I noticed with your APA recipe that your 15 minute hop additions are giving you 50+% utilisation of your 60 minute additions. Is this from your research, reading or experience. I have always just divided the utilisation simply by time ie. a 15 min boil will give you quarter the utilisation of a 60 min boil. Have I been over bittering my beers?
I would appreciate any feed back.
All the best, Barry.

PS I hope to make a decent APA one day.

 

[Jovial_Monk]

Hi Barry,

Try using just Amarillo hops in an APA one day, very clean, great aroma and flavor. Try pitching a batch with Saisson yeast, hmmmmmm!

Jovial Monk

 

[sosman]

I noticed with your APA recipe that your 15 minute hop additions are giving you 50+% utilisation of your 60 minute additions. Is this from your research, reading or experience. I have always just divided the utilisation simply by time ie. a 15 min boil will give you quarter the utilisation of a 60 min boil. Have I been over bittering my beers?

PS I hope to make a decent APA one day.

Barry,

The utilisation varies in a non linear fashion. Brewsta uses the curves derived by Glenn Tinseth. The nice thing about utilisation formulas is that there are so many to choose from. There are too many references to mention.

Also note, if you compare Brewsta's utilisation calcs with say promash when set to tinseth they will be out by a factor of 1.3 at least in the default settings.

As for brewing a nice APA - there is no good reason why you should have to wait. Find a recipe, try it, then tweak it to your liking. I have never brewed two APA's the same - in fact I posted another APA recipe I brewed today.

 

[spog]

umm, an a4 exersice school book i nicked from the kids when they were,nt looking!

 

[johnno]

I've trialled Promash and Beersmith. I am probably going for Beersmith at the moment.
Plus its on special at $19.95 at the moment.

cheers
johnno

 

[Samwise Gamgee]

At this stage I just use an A4 book to record my brews.

 

[warrenlw63]

7th year using ProMash. There may be better software out there. However I'm not aware of it.

Only complaint is that the updates have been a little slow of late.

Warren -

 

[Backlane Brewery]

FO big sheets of butchers paper stuck to the wall with Blu Tack, and written on in texta- dates brewed racked & bottled, ingredients, OG & FG, brew name & cap code.
Every so often we transfer this to a spreadsheet and add a rating.

 

[kitkat]

Excel spreadsheet so far, but I've only done 2 kits

QBrew: http://www.usermode.org/code.html, seems nice enough to record and plan ingredients, and it's completely free. Of course I'm not doing all grain, so maybe it's just nice for my intended extract usage.

From that page, seems someone from here (darren robinson) made a program that translates the promash recipes into BeerXML, which can be then read by qbrew.
http://www.beerxml.com/converter.htm

 

[Backlane Brewery]

Doc, take a bow..