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Brew Smith Pro ...

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G'day

I have been using Beersmith for years, think it was about 8 years ago when i bought the key, and have been using it for over a year in a 1200l DME brewhouse.

Theres a couple of things that would be great for pro brewers and some things I cant seem to correlate from real world to BS world. Anyways, if my $0.02c matters, happy to help.

Scotty
 
Scotty,
  Can you provide some details on additions you would like to see for the pros?

Brad
 
Brad

No for some rambling ....

Items we have found which match after some lab testing are:

* Brew house effiecny
* Hop utlisation

Things that never match is the Estimated final gravity. This may be more due to how we have BS set up or are using it. The main area is the Beer Profile area and FG's. If I look at one of our recipes, the starting gravity is 1.045 and the estimate is FG of 1.012. We track ferms every day, and know for this beer it finishes at 1.005 give or take a point.

The area we never use are the mash profile and the carbonation and storage. Not sure if you can hide these part of the user panel, or add in as a mod. We have a standard 2.75kg/l mash in, know we loose 10C from Mash-in to rest, and aim for a pH of 5.2-5.4 which we hit with regularity using a combination of hardeners, standard 60 minute boil.

The one area that would be of assistance is more notes feilds. Over a 2200l (our standard batch side), it would be nice to have a larger area to add in brewers instructions. At the moment we use the Taste Notes section, which for some beers are quite long.

I guess BS has been set-up for individual batch brewing, but not a high volume of repeated recipes. One of our beers we brew once a week, so it would be nice to have a format for recording each batch and its vitals to look at trends over time for Alc, OG/FG and such.

One thing my head brewer has introduced which is used widely commercially is 'grams per litre' for hoping. If there is a stuff up and we need to run in 100l less, it is much easier to be able to use a gm/l hop ration rather than go in and mess around with the recipe proper. Things happen in the brew house and if we have to go 100l short we dont want to adjust the whole recipe, only the hoping.

Finally is things like packaging and excise. We would love a facility to have the OG/FG line up, with Alc to prepare a report on the excise due and as Australia goes via a scaled and system per packaging size, to add in the pack size and the amount of pack and waste.

Anyways, that my ramblings for now. I hope this is positive, as BS saves our skin a hell of alot of times, esp for things like the tools functions and such.

Scotty
 
/// said:
Things that never match is the Estimated final gravity. This may be more due to how we have BS set up or are using it. The main area is the Beer Profile area and FG's. If I look at one of our recipes, the starting gravity is 1.045 and the estimate is FG of 1.012. We track ferms every day, and know for this beer it finishes at 1.005 give or take a point.
I can help a bit with this one.
With a 1.005 FG you are achieving 89% attenuation.  Make a duplicate of the yeast you use on this beer (yeast db) with the name indicating that it is for this beer.  Edit the attenuation in the duplicated yeast to be your calculated attenuation of 89%.  That should make your FG come out real close.

I do this all the time for my big beers where I strive for high attenuation.

Fred
 
/// said:
The one area that would be of assistance is more notes feilds.

+1 to the larger Notes text field.  Whatever the limit on chars happens to be, it's much too small...

The notes are all cut off for me...

- Off topic a little; I've been looking for some type of journal for brewing and just haven't figured out what I should do yet - a nice; auto dated log might just do the trick!

Mij
 
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