Cloud Ingredients?

New user and new brewer here.

I'm an all-grain brewer.  I stocked up on grains today, and started trying to add them to inventory.  I found that not everything I had was in the ingredients database, and I had to enter the ingredient.  It's a bit frustrating, since the manufacturers often use units that aren't the same as those used in the app; for example, BS2 wants SRM, while Crisp Malting Group gives ?L.  Or that BS2 wants Lintner for diastatic power, while Simpson's provides % d.b and lt?/kg.

Also, BS2 keeps default parameter values that are not necessarily so, for the new ingredient.

So, it occurred to me - is there a way of downloading malt and other ingredient data from the manufacturer, or some other source, perhaps a cloud database?

TIA,

jv

jviss said:

New user and new brewer here.

I'm an all-grain brewer.  I stocked up on grains today, and started trying to add them to inventory.  I found that not everything I had was in the ingredients database, and I had to enter the ingredient.  It's a bit frustrating, since the manufacturers often use units that aren't the same as those used in the app; for example, BS2 wants SRM, while Crisp Malting Group gives ?L.  Or that BS2 wants Lintner for diastatic power, while Simpson's provides % d.b and lt?/kg.

Also, BS2 keeps default parameter values that are not necessarily so, for the new ingredient.

So, it occurred to me - is there a way of downloading malt and other ingredient data from the manufacturer, or some other source, perhaps a cloud database?

TIA,

jv

Click to expand...

Beersmith does have downloadable profiles for ingredients not included in base installations. You need to if I recall go click on packages I can't remember as it's been a long time and you can add packages for crisp malt and really anything not included in base installations.

As Ck27 stated, there are add-ons for various ingredient sets which can be downloaded.  These all generally come from users, I believe.

When entering the grains, the form has a slot for color as 'srm', but in actual use, the program uses lovibond.  I know what the program labels it as SRM, but I've worked the calculations and it is actually Lovibond.  Enter the lovibond number for the grains. Grain color is measured as Lovibond or EBC.  SRM is a unit for the measurement of wort and beer color performed on a liquid and not solids, such as malt.

Lastly, the default parameters for ingredients is completely under your control.  Each ingredient has a default amount set for a default volume as part of the properties for that ingredient.  You can set those values to numbers which are more suitable for your size/scale of brewing.

Thank you for your replies, Ck27 and Oginme. 

On the color, I'm surprised that BS@ would label a field incorrectly, SRM when it's really ?L.  Have the acknowledged this?

They should allow entering ?L, SRM, or EBC, and do the calculation/conversion for you. 

(This brings up another limitation, and this, when entering amounts of ingredients in recipes, while ounces are displayed, one must enter fractional pounds).

On this topic, I'm an experienced electrical and mechanical CAD user.  BS2 is brewing CAD.  Many, most of the principles are the same.  In elec. and mech. CAD, vendors provide component (part) data in a format that is useable in the program, in great detail, that flows through the entire process.  I thought it would be great if the malters would do the same, and BS2 supported it.  Then you could just connect to the malter's web site and download the product data, one malt at a time, or one product at a time.

Right now, I'm "adding a grain" in BS2, then editing it, going back and forth between the malter's data sheet, online units conversion programs, and so on.  It's tedious and time consuming, and error prone.

I also wish I could enter "don't know" for grain description fields in BS2 rather than zero or a guess.

(This brings up another limitation, and this, when entering amounts of ingredients in recipes, while ounces are displayed, one must enter fractional pounds).

You can enter ingredients in other units by using an abbreviation of the desired unit, like 6oz or 1lb 6oz. You can even substitute metric units in the same manner, or visa versa and BS will do the conversion to your default measurement type.

There's a lot of information on features of BS at: www.beersmith.com/support/

jviss said:

Thank you for your replies, Ck27 and Oginme. 

On the color, I'm surprised that BS@ would label a field incorrectly, SRM when it's really ?L.  Have the acknowledged this?

They should allow entering ?L, SRM, or EBC, and do the calculation/conversion for you. 

(This brings up another limitation, and this, when entering amounts of ingredients in recipes, while ounces are displayed, one must enter fractional pounds).

On this topic, I'm an experienced electrical and mechanical CAD user.  BS2 is brewing CAD.  Many, most of the principles are the same.  In elec. and mech. CAD, vendors provide component (part) data in a format that is useable in the program, in great detail, that flows through the entire process.  I thought it would be great if the malters would do the same, and BS2 supported it.  Then you could just connect to the malter's web site and download the product data, one malt at a time, or one product at a time.

Right now, I'm "adding a grain" in BS2, then editing it, going back and forth between the malter's data sheet, online units conversion programs, and so on.  It's tedious and time consuming, and error prone.

I also wish I could enter "don't know" for grain description fields in BS2 rather than zero or a guess.

Click to expand...

The incorrect labeling has gone on through the last couple of versions and has been talked about extensively.  As I stated in my previous post, the Standard Reference Method (SRM), is strictly for measuring the color of wort or beer.  It is a spectrophotometric derived value based upon the absorption of light at 430 nm.  Since you cannot pass light effectively through a solid, it is meaningless for measuring the color of malt.  SRM and Lovibond are fairly consistent to each other.

The European Brewery Convention uses the same wavelength to measure color but passes the light through a 25 mm cuvette which is almost, but not quite twice the 12.7 mm used for SRM measurement.

Since all the color estimators (Morey, Daniels, Mosher) for beer color from malt start with lovibond to calculate the wort color as SRM, it really makes sense that the value be in Lovibond for malts. [And from my calculations and subsequent measurements of beer color, the value entered should be Lovibond in order to get a correct value for color estimation.]

When entering values into BeerSmith, you can let the program do the conversion for you.  If the specification sheet gives the color as 10 EBC, you can enter '10 EBC' in the color section and the program will convert the number for you.  This is also the case with entering other units into a recipe.  If you type if '8 oz' into the weight of a grain, the program will automatically convert it to the decimal equivalent for lbs, kg, or whatever your chosen unit of measure is.

While there are a number of equipment manufacturers who have created customized equipment profiles for their hardware, raw material manufacturers have been slow to realize the potential advantage in promoting use of their malts due to the ease of users getting the numbers.  Quite frankly, there are enough standard malts from the larger malt suppliers already included in the program that there may not be much of a demand.

What fields you you leave as '0' or 'I don't know'?  I usually copy and paste from the malt/hop supplier web site into the descriptor so that I can remind myself for newer components just why I had picked them up.

Thanks again, all.  I have since discovered the "File->Add-ons..." feature, and have "fixed" my inventory by using the grain profiles provided by, or for, the malters.  Excellent! 

I'm going to watch the videos.