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A Few Comments

A

Alan

Posted on our old message board on 20 Aug 2003
by Alan

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OK, installed it and at a first glance very nice!

  You've nailed the GUI hands-down. I like it better than StrangeBrew and ProMash. And your concept of 'profiles' for mashing schedules, equipment used, and other things is just brutal! And I mean brutal-good, not brutal-bad! I don't think any of the other guys do that - I never would have thought of it but I really like it!

 One thing I really like about StrangeBrew though is that it allows me to enter ingredients in any unit I like lbs, g, kg, etc, all mixed in the same recipe. Most of my recipes have a few pounds of this, a kg or so of that, and a few hundred g of something else. Whatever tick mark on the scale ends up being closest. I think most Canadians will be like this, in fact, since we use both systems interchangably.

 I find the entering of grains to be a bit clunky the way you have to keep hitting "increase amount" to get the amount you want. You should be able to just enter the amount you want.

 And I cannot figure out how to get it to tell me how much water to add in a step mash to get to mashout. It seems to want me to enter the amount of water to add, but that's what the program is supposed to do for me. I tell it how much grain I have, what grain/water ratio I want, and what temperatures I want to hit, then it tells me how much water to add for each step, and at what temp the water needs to be. I figured out a way to get it to do the first step, but not the following steps. Am I missing something?

Alan
 
Alan,
 Thanks for the kind comments!  ;)

 I like the idea about adding ingredients in mixed units -- perhaps a future upgrade?

  You don't have to use the increase/decrease to set the amount - you can enter it directly on the CHOOSE dialog when you choose an ingredient, and you can also double click any item to bring up an edit dialog that has an "amount" or "weight" field.

You can create your own mash profiles, but frankly the easiest way to use the mash feature is to just pick one of the existing profiles using the "Choose" button next to the "Mash Profile" in the main recipe window. There are a lot of great profiles there to use and they will adjust to fit your recipe.

 Finally  there is a short tutorial on creating a mash profile in the manual.

  The online link is http://www.beersmith.com/Help/using_mash_profiles.htm

Let me know if I can be of any further help!

Sincerely,
Brad
 
After entering in my first few recipes to copy from my old program to BeerSmith, I'm starting to get faster.  I was initially bummed there was no comma delimited import, but the text files I have from my previous program would have been a pain to convert anyway...and I'm actually enjoying reliving all my old batches as I enter them in.

One suggestion:  could you please add grams as a unit to use for yeast.  I don't have any problem with the package, and I noticed you can even specify how much is in the package, but my dry ale yeast (stop snickering!  ;)) is usually measured in grams and that wasn't an option.

Thanx a lot for filling the homebrew software void for easy to use, multi-level experience code!

- Brian
 
Another update...

Version 1.2 lets you enter units after the number in any field as long as it is of the same type (i.e. you need to enter weight units in a weight field, volume units in a volume field, etc...)

For example if you enter "2 kg" in a field and the current units for that field is pounds, BeerSmith will correctly do the conversion to pounds on the spot.

A full list of available unit identifiers is here:

  http://www.beersmith.com/whats_new_in_1_2.htm

Cheers!
Brad
 
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