BeerSmith is useless for controlling inventory

I have given up on BeerSmith's ability to keep an accurate tally of items on hand of ingredients.  If I have to constantly take a physical inventory then I might as well just tally by hand also.

Yesterday I wanted to know if I had enough on hand (except base grain) to do a particular brew on the next warm day if it should come.  To be accurate I did another physical inventory of grains and hops and made corrections in the program.  Since Sunday is supposed to be in the 50's here in Buffalo, a rare winter brew day I decided to run to the LHBS rather than wait for a delivery that might not get here in time.  I pulled up my double IPA, put it in the shopping cart and it said I needed 16+ lbs of 2-row.  I knew from the previous day I had 5+ on hand.  I also noticed that the WLP002 I used to brew an Old Ale a couple of weeks ago AND removed the ingredients was there again with all the other ingredients used.  So I basically wasted my time yesterday doing an inventory and correcting the BeerSmith stock on hand.  It is an fairly easy program to create a recipe because it does the math/formula computations but it can't keep an inventory for crap.

This may not be what happened to you, but I've made this error.  I bought and entered 10# of some add-on base malt like Dingemanns Pils, and then choose a generic pils or the Weyermann pils in the recipe.  This most often happens with I re-use an old recipe that used X and now I have Y on hand.  I have to update the recipe to what I currently have and will use, or the Remove from Inventory command will not find it nor remove it accurately. 

Barring that error, I've not had issues with the Remove from Inventory working fine. 

Along the same lines as Maltliker, about a year ago, I spent a huge amount of time adding shorthand codes for malts and their manufacturers. BeerSmith doesn't do well with more than one "Munich Malt." It gets lost in deducting inventory and doesn't give you a notice about it. 

So, my malts now have WY for Wyermann, BM for Briess malt and so forth.  Not only does this help me with inventory, but it also makes the shopping list a lot easier to use an keeps accurate prices by maltster.

One thing you have to do when you shop is to first add the recipes you've already purchased for to the shopping list and not deduct a recipe until you've made the purchase and added the ingredients to inventory. Otherwise, BeerSmith will change the amount needed based on the difference between the list and actual inventory.

I manage a massive inventory of at least 100+ items. The integrity of the software seemed flawed so I exported it to a csv file and imported that into a spread sheet. I couldn't be happier.


Not only do I have complete control over deductions, but I can dedicate certain ingredients for planned brews, meaning I know the Cascade is for the pale ale and won't get used in the stout.

Also I am able to quickly sort ingredients by year of purchase which helps to target ones getting past their prime sooner rather than later.

Also if 3 upcoming planned batches use the same yeast, I can quickly see that and plan according to reuse the yeast.

Thanks for the comments guys...  I try to keep as little inventory on hand as possible so I think I'm going to lower it to the as near minimum as possible.  I do try to keep names similar because I have seen the recipe conflicts with certain malt names and perhaps try to add codes.  I do think the problem is as brewfun says is that names from recipes don't always match up with the name given in the ingredient especially if you pull a recipe from the cloud and tweak it more to your style. 

I went back and noticed that the yeast was English Ale (White Labs # WLP1002)[35.49 ml] in the recipe and BeerSmith has English Ale as the name then all other information separated in columns which probably aren't read by the program in the removal process. 

I only have about 15 beers in my rotation so next snow day I'll have to sit down and cross reference my recipes to inventory names and this may solve the problem.  And be super vigilant when adding and tweaking recipes.  I'm guessing that the Substitute button will be my new friend...  But at best the inventory is only a guide.  Keep inventory low, do a physical inventory a couple times a year and make a Frankenbeer every so often!!!!

Thanks again.

allentwnguy said:

I'm guessing that the Substitute button will be my new friend... 

Click to expand...

Ah! yes, it will. Each time you import a new recipe, you'll want to substitute their grain names for yours. It doesn't take that long, though.