Here is a list of the most important changes for the BeerSmith 4.0 release. Scroll down to bottom of the page to view changes made in recent releases.
Highlights
- Support for dark mode on both Windows and Mac, and support for high resolution icons and graphics on both platforms.
- New cloud/local modes let you store your data where you want – either in the web or locally while still accessing everything online.
- Improved brewing features including recipe checks, a simplified and consistent interface, improved models, more unit options and new brewing tools
- Yeast can now be specified in milliliters (or liters) and grams, and the yeast starter models and databases have been completely rewrittten to reflect modern practices
- The water profile models have been completely updated to reflect new water salts, better pH adjusment features, updated chemistry and more
- The entire backend for BeerSmith has been updated to use SQL databases with backups to provide greatly enhanced reliability and security
- The inventory and shopping features have been re-written to give you control over which ingredients to add, and access to the online shared web inventory
- New tools have been added and hundreds of fixes have been made across the entire platform
Cloud Mode versus Local Mode
- BeerSmith 4 has a new startup option to use either the cloud/web storage or your local hard drive for primary storage.
- This enables you to work from your shared cloud/web based data for a single data view between your desktop and web based version of BeerSmith.
- This gives you a single set of data across platforms including your web based recipes, ingredients, profiles, shopping list and inventory so you can access your data from any browser (including your tablet and phone on the web).
- The local data recipes, ingredients, profiles and inventory is also available for those who don’t want their primary data stored on the web.
- The major views are divided between the Local and Cloud menus to give you access to profiles, ingredients, shopping list and inventory on either side.
- When adding ingredients or profiles to a recipe you can toggle the Show Cloud Data box to show either local or cloud views as needed to reach the data you want.
- Cloud addons/preloaded ingredients can now be managed through the addons dialog along with local addons.
- Since you can now work with the web based inventory and shopping list you can access your shopping list and inventory from any device via the web now.
- You can change modes any time from the Tools->Startup dialog.
Improved Brewing Features
- The user interface has been redesigned to highlight the most frequently used functions and simplify use for new brewers.
- A Run Checks button on the design tab lets you run checks on the recipe to identify potential issues with your recipe before brewing.
- A New Session button is available from the session and design tabs in a recipe. This function lets you archive a copy of the current recipe in the brew log, reset the measured values to estimated, clear the fermentation data, reset the date/time of the recipe and also bump the version number.
- Brew dates now include a timestamp.
- Added Seltzer as a new brewing type in addition to beer, mead, cider and wine for recipes.
- Program now handles secondary and tertiary fermentable additions by calculating a new “Est OG Through Tertiary” ($VIRTUAL_OG) value that is used to calculate the correct final gravity and ABV. This is important for recipes that have large secondary or tertiary fermentable additions.
- Added pH to the fermentation data graph so you can track pH along with OG and temperature during fermentation.
- Added a variety of new unit settings including liquid yeast units, dry yeast units, water/grain ratios, calories and hop rates under Options->Units. These are used throughout the program so you can now (for example) specify carbonation in grams/liters or water/grain ratios in kg/l within BeerSmith.
- Hop rates are now available as a custom field – can show hop rates for dry hop, boil hop, mash hop, refractometer units and whirlpool hops in g/l, lb/bbl or oz/gal. You can adjust the units from the Options->Units dialog.
- Misc ingredients can now be included in the whirlpool.
- Addons are now more easiliy manages using a simple checkbox system to specify which you want installed. Cloud addons can also be managed from BeerSmith.
- Added slider controls on the various adjusment dialogs (Color, Gravity, etc…) to make it quicker to adjust your recipe.
Yeast Changes
- You can now specify yeast in grams or milliliters for dry and liquid yeast. This makes it easier to scale recipes, and more precise when calculating cell counts and starters.
- The yeast starter tools and tabs have been completely reworked to let you adjust the pitch rate as well as make it easier to estimate starter sizes.
- For liquid yeasts you can now adjust your pitch rate to either target a certain number of cells/ml-degree plato or alternately target an estimated number of million cells per ml. This is in line with professional pitching techniques and also yeast manufacturer recommendations.
- For dry yeast, the calculator shows the recommended dry pitch rate for the individual yeast, and estimates the number of cells/ml from that. This lets you match the pitch rates recommended by the yeast provider.
- For dry yeast you can now calculate a starter based on the pitch rate and batch size.
- All of the major yeast listings have been reworked to include current cells/ml and recommended pitch rates for dry and liquid yeasts to support the new features.
- The viability numbers for all updated yeast addons have been updated to reflect current yeast viability models.
- The yeast propagation models have also been updated to include a more accurate fit to yeast cell growth data, and updated stir plate data.
- The two stage propagation model has been updated to include a better balance between first and second stage starter sizes.
Water Profile Changes
- The water profile calculator has been completely overhauled working from the underlying chemistry and molecular weights. Several of the salt ion additions from BeerSmith were outdated and in error and those have been corrected which may result in different estimates than the previous version.
- In particular CaCl and Calcium Carbonate (chalk) factors were off, though all of the factors were updated by calculating directly from their molar mass. CaCl has been changed to reflect the annhydrous version which is the most commonly used form.
- Pickling Lime and Magnesium Chloride were added as water adjustment salts. You can also exclude pickling lime or chalk (CaCO3) as typically both are not used at the same time. It is recommended that both chalk and pickling lime be added after mashing in.
- Added a checkbox in the match water profile dialog that lets you combine mash and sparge water additions into one set of additions for those who add their water salts up front.
- Modified water matching tool to allow you to target a final water profile for extracts, meads, wines, cider and seltzers that do not have a mash step.
- The water profile tab now estimates the mash water profile with analysis, but also shows the estimated water profile into the boil and into the fermenter.
- Mash pH adjustment has been simplified to two buttons. One for estimating an acid addition from estimated pH, and a second one to adjust it based on a pH measurement. This vastly simplifies pH adjustments, as you no longer need to fiddle with the little calculator fields from BeerSmith 3 to get the pH you want.
Improved Data Security and Reliability
- Moved to a SQL based database for vastly improved reliability and security for all brewing data including recipes, profiles, ingredients, inventory and options.
- All changes to the SQL database are now committed as soon as you save a recipe or item, minimizing the risk of loss.
- The program has been fully debugged for memory leaks and idle time CPU usage to eliminate issues with it running for extended periods of time.
- Automatic backups are still made of your SQL database in full periodically to provide additional security.
- Cloud data is now securely handled in memory, increasing speed and reliability.
- The Recover from Auto Backup command now lets you open any table in a separate tab for recovery to make it easier to pull individual recipes and data without having to replace the entire database.
- The Recipe Archive, which stored major changes to all recipes is stored in a separate database from the main database for additional security.
- All passwords stored are now encrypted.
Inventory and Shopping Features
- Inventory table has been separated from the ingredient tables making the inventory much more seamless to manage, and also making it compatible with the web version.
- You can now access the web based inventory and shopping list views from the program and perform inventory/shop functions using either view.
- When adding a recipe to the shopping list, adding items from the shopping list to inventory or removing recipes from inventory you can now select individual items to add/move/remove which gives you much more contol over the inventory and which items are used.
- Added a Removed from Inventory date to the recipe. This date is shown when removing a recipe from inventory and a warning will be displayed on the remove from inventory dialog if you try to remove a recipe twice in a short number of days.
Tools
- Yeast starter tool has been completely reworked to reflect new yeast models, pitch rate adjustment and quantities similar to the new yeast tab in recipes.
- A new Parti-Gyle tool has been added to estimate the gravity and volumes when doing two separate runnings from a single mash.
- The water profile tool has been fully updated to include the new water factors, salt additions and updated models.
- A new Hop Rate unit tool has been added to make it easy to convert between hop rates (lbs/bbl, g/l, oz/gal).
- A new Color Units tool has been added to make it easy to convert between coloe units.
- A new carbonation units tool has been added to convert between volumes and grams per liter.
- Alcohol/ABV tool now estimates carbohydrates calories and grams for those watching their waist.
- Common keg sizes were added to the volume unit tool to make it easy to estimate kegs needed from a volume of beer.
Additional Bug Fixes and Small Enhancements
- I now have a new SQL based editing tool available to make it easier to translate and publish language files for BeerSmith. Email me for more info
- Drag and Drop now works on the Mac with recipes and recipe folders
- You can now drag/drop a BSMX file onto BeerSmith and it will open it in a new tab
- Double clicking a bsmx file in Windows will now properly open it in BeerSmith 4 even if BeerSmith is already running.
- Attempting to run a new copy of BeerSmith on windows will bring up the current instance and not show an error message.
- Corrected keg carbonation with sugar option to use normal carbonation estimates. Previous version used a reduced amount of sugar for kegs.
- Fixed bug where steeped grains were not showing up properly on the brew sheet for all grain recipes.
- Changed “Brew sheet” button to just “Steps” on the design tab.
- Corrected bug where mash temperatures were not being properly updated when the mash tun starting temperature was changed.
- Fixed a minor issue where deleting all the grains from a recipe would not properly update the mash grain weight.
- Improvements were made to license handling to specify exactly what is limiting a license if registration fails.
- Check for updates commands were fixed to make it easier to notify when an update is available.
- Many fixes to the do/undo system to prevent issues with undo of large data changes.
- Garetz hop formula has been fixed. In BeerSmith 3 it was not showing the proper estimate for Garetz.
- Juice units prices were not properly handled in the previous version and also they did not reflect properly when moved to inventory.
- Added bold text to many dialogs to highlight the key fields or outputs.
- Corrected issue where tertiary fermentation phase was not showing up on the calendar.
- Fixed issue where BNW pH model was not adjusting pH properly on some earlier (3.2 or lower) versions of BeerSmith
- Fixed bug where locked recipes could still be edited in some cases.
- Fixed issue with download/install of some addons which failed to fully download on some older versions.
Known Issues
- On both Windows and the Mac, switching between dark and light mode does not correctly update a running version of BeerSmith. You need to restart BeerSmith to pick up and light/dark mode changes.
- On Windows, the Date fields still show with a light background when the system is in dark mode
- Due to security restrictions on the Mac, the File->Import BeerSmith 2/3 function is not as automated. Current Mac applications are limited by the operating system with regards to file access and can’t automatically accesss the older default BeerSmith file locations. As a result the user has to take additional steps to import older data themselves.
Updates Build 4.0.20
- Fixed significant bug where non-ascii characters and spaces in the user’s path would cause a “LoadOpts:” error preventing BeerSmith from loading in Windows
- Corrected bug where display flag for the temp/gravity on the fermentation data graph were reversed causing display issues
- Added the number of subfolders and recipe count to the folder tree display (left side of screen)
- Corrected a bug where the hop amount field did not change units when changing hop form to CO2 extract
- Added missing checkbox to filter water selections by local inventory when choosing water ingredients
- Added boil volume to the list of fields that can be included in the custom “Stats” section at the bottom of the design tab (along with brewhouse efficiency).
- Added a new feature on the Options->Look and Feel tab that allows you to upload and use a custom alarm sound for the brewday timer. The alarm file must be a WAV audio format file.
Updates Build 4.0.17/4.0.18
- Improved color contrast on the style displays and also the fermentation/aging graph
- Added batch size back to the scale recipe dialog so you can directly enter a new size, though it has a warning message about equipment profile issues if you do so
- Corrected issues with recipe folder shortcut tree on left side – they now expand/contract properly when clicked
- Made batch volume editable from main screen and also added brewhouse efficiency as an optional field under statistics for those who wish to directly edit it
- Corrected issue on Windows dark mode where session graph was not properly getting refreshed when changing tabs
- Corrected issue where finding orphan folders or recipes in the cloud would bring up a dialog and crash the program
- Removed Import BeerSmith Inventory from the file menu as this function is incorporated into the BeerSmith 3 import as well as Recover from Zip commands already