SilverLeaf_Brewery
Apprentice
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2013
- Messages
- 4
- Reaction score
- 0
Hello all!
Starting in with BeerSmith software as our development brewery is formalizing it's recipes, results, thoughts, etc. We will be buying several licenses, but do have the following comments after playing around with the software for the past few days.
Water profiling
1. I know this is already called out, but we're going to do so again because it caused a tremendous amount of confusion at first. The salt additives do not track accurately on the recipe page when changes are made to the volume of water. They are also not linked and have to be individually deleted.
2. The 'auto-additions' feature is brilliant
3. There needs to be a lot more documentation or videos on how to use the tool itself
4. While the pre-set location information is great if you're trying to either ballpark your numbers, or match a particular location, it is *severely* lacking in trying to match a particular style. For example, the 'Bru'n Water' spreadsheet (and others) have general water profiles for different colors of beers with different properties (yellow balanced, brown malty, etc...) What we had to do was open the Bru'n spreadsheet, and create new water profiles as initial templates. Then we used our local water information as the base, put the style template as the 'target profile', adjust the total volume of water we were going to use (we treat the entire HLT), get the salt adjustments, and then save the whole thing as a new template which we then used in the recipe.
Confusing? Yeah. That took the better part of 4 hours and two peeps who are really pretty good with this sort of stuff to figure out. What would be good is to be able to enter your local water profile as a template. Then, pick the target profile (which would be populated both by locations, styles, and custom entries from either you or your friends (cloud)) you want to hit. Use that awesome auto-additions feature and then either save it or apply it directly to the recipe (or both). On the recipe tab, the water profile would be called out with the salts listed as sub-items. You could adjust water volumes (with salts auto-adjusting) or delete the whole thing.
HERMS equipment and mashing profiles
We were very impressed with the amount of thought and flexibility that you put into this tool to help support folks that are using coolers, decotion mashes, etc. We didn't see anything in there regarding fly sparging. Also- it would be cool to see a HERMS coil be put into the equipment list, as well as pumps, hoses, coolers, etc. Although most of those do add 'dead space volume', it would be cool to have those items be available for reference when defining the mash steps.
Possible Yeast Calculation bug?
Ran into a fun bit where the yeast calculation was requiring 46 packets of WYEAST 1056 for a 6 gallon batch! Hey, I'm all for starters... but good Lord! ;D
Good start with the tool-tips!
As you get further into numbers and looking at the volumes and theoreticals, what's good is to see that you have that information and that there are basic tool-tips explaining what they are. What isn't very clear is how those numbers are derived and how changing some of them can affect the rest of the recipe. May we suggest clearing it up some, and possibly having a new section called, "lessons learned" or similar. The idea would be that you could put in the results that you got, compare it to what was expected, and look at some different causes for the discrepancies. In addition, results from here could affect your brewery profile as a whole (adjusting efficiency, attenuation expectations, etc...). Expanding on this might allow you to compare the result difference between using a 6 gallon glass carboy and a conical fermenter.
Overall, very good job. We really like where this product is heading, and think that the authors are on the right track. We'll continue to play (first gotta buy those licenses) and post thoughts on this thread as we find different kudos or questions. 8)
Starting in with BeerSmith software as our development brewery is formalizing it's recipes, results, thoughts, etc. We will be buying several licenses, but do have the following comments after playing around with the software for the past few days.
Water profiling
1. I know this is already called out, but we're going to do so again because it caused a tremendous amount of confusion at first. The salt additives do not track accurately on the recipe page when changes are made to the volume of water. They are also not linked and have to be individually deleted.
2. The 'auto-additions' feature is brilliant
3. There needs to be a lot more documentation or videos on how to use the tool itself
4. While the pre-set location information is great if you're trying to either ballpark your numbers, or match a particular location, it is *severely* lacking in trying to match a particular style. For example, the 'Bru'n Water' spreadsheet (and others) have general water profiles for different colors of beers with different properties (yellow balanced, brown malty, etc...) What we had to do was open the Bru'n spreadsheet, and create new water profiles as initial templates. Then we used our local water information as the base, put the style template as the 'target profile', adjust the total volume of water we were going to use (we treat the entire HLT), get the salt adjustments, and then save the whole thing as a new template which we then used in the recipe.
Confusing? Yeah. That took the better part of 4 hours and two peeps who are really pretty good with this sort of stuff to figure out. What would be good is to be able to enter your local water profile as a template. Then, pick the target profile (which would be populated both by locations, styles, and custom entries from either you or your friends (cloud)) you want to hit. Use that awesome auto-additions feature and then either save it or apply it directly to the recipe (or both). On the recipe tab, the water profile would be called out with the salts listed as sub-items. You could adjust water volumes (with salts auto-adjusting) or delete the whole thing.
HERMS equipment and mashing profiles
We were very impressed with the amount of thought and flexibility that you put into this tool to help support folks that are using coolers, decotion mashes, etc. We didn't see anything in there regarding fly sparging. Also- it would be cool to see a HERMS coil be put into the equipment list, as well as pumps, hoses, coolers, etc. Although most of those do add 'dead space volume', it would be cool to have those items be available for reference when defining the mash steps.
Possible Yeast Calculation bug?
Ran into a fun bit where the yeast calculation was requiring 46 packets of WYEAST 1056 for a 6 gallon batch! Hey, I'm all for starters... but good Lord! ;D
Good start with the tool-tips!
As you get further into numbers and looking at the volumes and theoreticals, what's good is to see that you have that information and that there are basic tool-tips explaining what they are. What isn't very clear is how those numbers are derived and how changing some of them can affect the rest of the recipe. May we suggest clearing it up some, and possibly having a new section called, "lessons learned" or similar. The idea would be that you could put in the results that you got, compare it to what was expected, and look at some different causes for the discrepancies. In addition, results from here could affect your brewery profile as a whole (adjusting efficiency, attenuation expectations, etc...). Expanding on this might allow you to compare the result difference between using a 6 gallon glass carboy and a conical fermenter.
Overall, very good job. We really like where this product is heading, and think that the authors are on the right track. We'll continue to play (first gotta buy those licenses) and post thoughts on this thread as we find different kudos or questions. 8)