Today I take a look at just a few of new brewing features in BeerSmith 4. This is part of my series of articles on the new BeerSmith 4 release on 19 March 2026.
Improved Session Handling
Its not uncommon for brewers to brew the same beer several times, making only small changes for each batch. Since BeerSmith stores all of the data in a recipe, basically the recipe itself records all the session data. While we’ve had a “Copy to Brew Log” feature to help you store previous beers, the feature was not widely used.
For BeerSmith 4 I decided to encapsulate all of the “new session” features into a single function. From the session tab for any open recipe you can click on the New Session button (also shows as a small icon from Design view) and it will show a dialog as follows:
The idea here is when you have completed a brewing session and recorded any fermentation/measurements and notes you can click this button and it will archive a copy of the recipe to your brew log, reset your measured values to estimated, clear the fermentation data, reset the recipe date to today and finally bump the version number on the recipe to the next version. This way your Brew Log folder has a copy of all of the recipes you have brewed along with correct dates, version numbers and the recorded data.
Fermentation pH Data and Graphing
Many users have asked that I include pH data on the age graph so you can record pH entries over time as we do today with temperature and gravity. I have added this in BeerSmith 4, so you can now keep track of your pH drop as your beer, mead or cider ferments.
Recipe Brewing and Consistency Checks
BeerSmith 4 also includes a new Run Checks button on the Design and Session tab which let you run a series of checks before brewing. This new feature takes a look at your entire recipe and looks for issues or inconsistencies in the recipe equipment, ingredients and settings.
A sample recipe report looks something like this:
As you can see it is divided into three sections. The first one shows critical issues like a bad brew date, inconsistent or negative volumes, or in this case a mash tun that is too small for the grain bill used. Next are potential problems, like not having enough yeast pitched, or a mash pH that has not been adjusted. The final section has suggestions which are lower priority like the beer being slightly outside the style guidelines.
This new feature is intended to be run just before you brew, so it can offer suggestions and capture potential problems to avoid making a bad batch.
New Unit Settings and Custom Fields
A variety of new unit settings have been added including liquid yeast units, dry yeast units, water/grain ratio units, calories, and hop rates. These are used throughout the program so you can now do things like specify carbonation in grams/liters or water ratios in kg/l within BeerSmith.
A variety of custom fields have been added as well and these can be added to the main Local/Cloud Recipes using View->Customize Columns as well as the main design tab for any recipe using the Add More Fields button on the bottom of that tab (under Statistics section). Also a search capability has been added to the custom columns dialog making it much easier to find the field you are looking for.
A few examples of the new fields for recipes include: Est Calories from Carbs, fields for the Boil Hop Rate, Dry Hop Rate, Mash Hop Rate, etc which can now be displayed in hop rate units (adjustable on the Options->Units dialog) like lb/bbl or g/l.
Many Other Improved Brewing Features
A ton of other improvements have been made to make BeerSmith more accessible and more powerful:
- Added Seltzer as a recipe type so you can now use BeerSmith with seltzers.
- Brew dates now include a timestamp.
- Program now properly handles secondary and tertiary fermentable additions by calculating a new “Est OG Through Tertiary” ($VIRTUAL_OG) value that is used to estimate the final gravity and ABV. So now you can properly calculate secondary additions.
- Misc ingredients can now be included in the whirlpool.
- Slider controls have been added to the various adjustment dialogs (Color, Gravity, etc…) to make adjusting your recipe quicker.
- Major yeast, mash pH and water changes, documented in separate articles and videos on the blog.
That is a quick summary of just a portion of the new features in BeerSmith 4. To download the trial or learn more please visit our main website at BeerSmith.com.
