Fifteen Years of BeerSmith – Our 15th Anniversary

In late October of 2003, I published version 1.0 of BeerSmith. Now 15 years later, the BeerSmith community has grown and through the software, newsletter, articles and podcast to reach hundreds of thousands of brewers worldwide. I would like to personally thank each and every one of you for your continued support.

A Brief History of BeerSmith

BeerSmith was originally designed as a personal beer brewing tool for my own use. In early 2003, a few people from various forums and news groups helped me refine it from a relatively primitive collection of tools into the first release. The first version was released in late October of 2003. The program included the basic recipe builder and a number of brewing tools and was only available for Windows.

BeerSmith 1 was followed by 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 in the following years, but still remained a bit of a niche tool until about 2008. In 2008, I took major steps to revamp the web site, and also started the weekly BeerSmith Blog, which now has over 500 articles on brewing. I also started working on social media and a bit more marketing which resulted in a slow increase in traffic and sales over the next few years.

The next major milestone was 2010, when I made the choice to leave my day job and take on BeerSmith full time. I started the BeerSmith newsletter as a way to share articles that Spring. That Fall, I started the BeerSmith podcast and also started working full time on BeerSmith 2. A collection of my articles was published in book form in November as Home Brewing with BeerSmith. BeerSmith 2 was launched in June of 2011, right before that year’s Homebrew convention. BeerSmith 2 added the tabbed browsing interface many are familiar with, letting you work with several tools and recipes at once. It also included support for the Mac and eventually Linux as well.

In 2012, I added the BeerSmith cloud at BeerSmithRecipes.com which has since grown to over 800,000 recipes. In 2013, BeerSmith mobile was added for Android, iPhone, iPad and the Kindle Fire. In 2014, John Palmer and I shot and published two full length videos on brewing: How to Brew Extract and All Grain, which were also well received. In the years to follow versions 2.2 and 2.3 were published.

Finally on June 15th of this year, I published BeerSmith 3 which added mead, wine and cider support to the BeerSmith recipe program, along with a number of advanced beer brewing functions like mash pH estimation and better whirlpool hop support. The updated mobile version followed a little over a month later bringing many of the same features to phone and tablet users.

A Few Statsistics (as of October 2018)

BeerSmith is used worldwide, and the software and articles have been translated into many different languages:

• BeerSmith web site and blog: 32.5 million page views since 2007
• BeerSmithRecipes.com: hosts 809,732 recipes for 172,892 users with 22 million page views
• The BeerSmith Newsletter: has over 86,000 subscribers
• The BeerSmith Podcast: 5.14 million audio downloads
• BeerSmith Youtube: 1.8 million views, 13,937 subscribers
• Twitter @BeerSmith : 24,800 followers
• Facebook BeerSmithFans: 14,622 likes

Thank You All

I would like to personally thank each and every one of you for your continued support of BeerSmith, along with my family who make it all possible. I feel incredibly blessed to be able to pursue home brewing full time, as well as having the opportunity to meet and exchange messages with thousands of brewers who share a passion for beer. Best wishes to you and thank you again for everything!