What is Reddit's opinion of Brewtarget?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

If brewing software is new to you and you want to dabble without spending Brew Target is free, open source and pretty straight forward - although the interface is outdated, much like Beer Smith.

Personally, I abandoned Beer Smith for BeerTools Pro, but it also comes with a learning curve. However, it is very easy on the eyes and that made a big difference for me.

Check out brewtarget, it's free and will let you tweak the recipe as you need to. Alternatively you can try out beersmith, but it costs money after the 3-week trial.

Not directly responsive, but once you get comfortable with determining your strike temperature, its important/interesting to know that on the 148 - 156 scale, the cooler the temp the dryer the beer will be.

Also, software is very helpful. If you don't want to pay for BeerSmith, BrewTarget is a serviceable alternative (its all I've ever used)

> beersmith UI in general is bad

This. It tries to do a poor knockoff of the MSOffice Ribbon, and it looks especially bad/out of place on Linux.

> I havent used beersmith before

Brewtarget has a much nicer UI, and is open source to boot. Try both, and see which one you prefer.

I've got an OLD laptop that I installed Linux on just to run Brewtarget. Otherwise, for web-based, I've been happy with brewtoad.com. Not as many options but gets the job done. Even though it's not as advanced, I probably use brewtoad more just because I can log in from anywhere and see/tweak recipes.

Why don't you try brewtarget? It's free as in free beer and has an active development team behind. Granted, BeerSmith is a bit more complete, but for what most of the people do, brewtarget is more than enough.

there is also free software that you can download and install called Brewtarget (http://www.brewtarget.org/). You can enter many of these things into this software and it will do the calculations for you.

Congratulations on the recent purchase or theft of an all grain starter kit.

Pardon the wall of text:

The 2 gallon cooler works great if you set up your mash and sparge volumes accordingly. When I do 5 gallon batches I usually mash at 1.25 qt/lb, but if I do that in the 2 gallon μMLT I get a mash of about 3 quarts and a sparge of 2.4 gallons. So I split them evenly which ends up mashing at about 2.1 qt/lb (depending on the recipe). This turns out to be about 1.2-1.4 gallons for mash and the same for sparging. with between 2-3 pounds of grist in a typical 1 gallon batch, 1.5 gallons of water is right up to the top of the μMLT.

I use BrewTarget (Free, open source software, and really very good) to build recipes and calculate mash volumes. It's nice because I can enter my exact equipment and the recipe gets calculated based on my thermal mass, specific heat (cal/(g*K)), dead space, and boil kettle evaporation rate (a bigger diameter kettle loses more to boil off per hour than a smaller one). BrewTarget figures out exactly how much wort I need to collect pre-boil and how to get that volume with mash and sparge water

When you scale up, I would go for a 10 gallon cooler. You will be mashing and sparging with 4-8 gallons depending on your pre-boil volume to account for boil off. You just cant fit all that stuff in a 5 gallon cooler.

The biggest contributing factor to heat loss in the case of small 1 gallon batches is lack of volume. Small volumes of water just don't retain heat as well as 6 gallons, so I end up losing about 4-5 degrees fahrenheit over the course of an hour in the small mash tun.

I read this book called Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse by John Mallett. It got me really interested in brewing. I was unaware of malt extract kits before I started looking at how to brew. I already knew I wanted to create recipes based on the taste, smell, mouthfeel, and degrees Lovibond of a grain.

I use Fedora Linux as my primary desktop, and someone pointed me to BrewTarget. This software has an inbuilt database of several all grain recipes. I set up the brewing equipment section with my kettle size and evaporation rate (volume/hour), MLT volume, thermal mass, and dead space. I used the BrewTarget Saison as a base, then substituted the default grains with the equivalents available at the local brewing store. I also modified the hops additions a bit because the original recipe called for Hallertau AA 4.7% and all I could get were Hallertau AA 2.7%.

Once all this was entered into the BrewTarget software, I ran the mash wizard and it calculated my strike water and batch sparge volumes and temperatures for a goal post boil volume of 5.5 gallons.

The mash was 4.1 gallons heated to 166.9° for target of 147° for 60 min. It was locked down at 148° for the whole hour. The batch sparge was 4.6 gallons heated to 183° for target of 165° for 15 min. I hit 167°.

The first brew I did was a Brown Ale. I did not have my equipment properly set up in BrewTarget and my mash and sparge temperatures were both low by 5-8°. It turned out ok, but I think that the lower mash temp extracted way more sugar. OG was supposed to be 1.046 but I ended up with 1.056. It hit the expected FG of 1.013 and has a bit more EtOH than would be expected for a brown ale.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f82/ is a great resource for recipes - frequently the same thread will have multiple iterations of the same recipe as the OP and others tweak their results. I recommend http://beersmith.com/ (though it looks like the site is down right now) or http://www.brewtarget.org (free if you're on a tight budget) for recipe scaling. Cheers, and have fun!

This turned out awesome. No way I could have done this without all the tips in this subreddit, especially ideas for gear on the cheap. I used the Nut Brown recipe from the BrewTarget application. My local homebrew shop helped me put together the grain bill and the right yeast and hops. This has been a very satisfying experience and I look forward to doing it more frequently.

I quite like Brewtarget. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Brewfather or Beersmith but does have a decent amount of feature parity. It's free and open source, and the code development has picked up recently too.

http://www.brewtarget.org/

https://github.com/Brewtarget/brewtarget

For those who don't know, there's free (as in speech) beer things for Sysadmins, you just need to do the compiling yourself :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer
http://freebeer.org/blog/
http://www.brewtarget.org/

I've been using BrewTarget for 6 years and just recently switch to BeerSmith a few months ago. I personally like the way BrewTarget is set up more and like open source software. It's a better UI and easier to create/edit recipes and log the important stuff during a brew day. The only things I don't like about it is that it STILL doesn't have the 2015 BJCP guidelines so I had to manually enter them each brew, and the builds on their site are a couple years old. BeerSmith seems to have a more accurate ingredient database. I dropped like 3% efficiency when I switched because of it. lol The only other thing I like about BeerSmith is just that it's what all my brew friends are using too, so it makes things slightly easier. If something happened and I couldn't use BeerSmith anymore, I'd happily switch back to BrewTarget.

For pH and water addition calculations, like others have said, just use Bru 'n Water. I guess BeerSmith's is not good.

http://www.brewtarget.org/

Its free, Source Code is available for download. I have not tried the software myself, but will be giving it a go shortly. Runs on Max, Windows, and Linux. For the price its worth a shot.

The software calculators are handy for formulating and modifying recipes, but the real benefit to brewing software (for me at least) is how easy it is to keep notes about each and every brew I do. I also add notes after about what I would do differently next time, how it came out, etc.

I use Brewtarget, which is free and open source. (http://www.brewtarget.org)

There's also BrewTarget: Cross-platform, open source. I've also been using the All-grain Brewer's Worksheet (a spreadsheet made by someone from one of the Google+ homebrewing groups) lately.

BrewTarget is one I've been using that's free and seems cool.

There's also brewgr.com which is web based and also kind of neat.

I'm not an expert by any stretch, but both of those have been good enough for my needs. I'm sure there are lots of others though.

For simple IBU calcs, check out: http://www.brewersfriend.com/ibu-calculator Brewer's Friend also has all sorts of other handy tools, like hydrometer conversions, ABV calc, etc.

One other thing I'd recommend is brewing software. Brewing software makes it really easy to create new recipes or edit pre-existing ones (such as swapping Tettnang for Sorachi hops). A good freeware option is Brewtarget http://www.brewtarget.org/ But I personally use and love BeerSmith http://beersmith.com/

Can't wait to hear how the kolsch turns out!

Thank you, and great question. The target strike temperature is 152° F. I used BrewTarget (free/libre open source software) to calculate the thermal mass (~ 9 lbs.) and specific heat (cal/(g*K), or 0.359 for plastic) of my mash tun, the grain mass and temperature, and the initial temperature of the mash tun. The software then calculates the necessary initial temperature for the strike water to hit the goal of 152. In this case, it was 172.224° F.

This may seem like it may include too many variables to be useful to other people. so why would I publish it? The numbers I published are calculated for a 10 gallon beverage cooler mash tun, which many people use. If you use a different vessel, or do RIMS or eHERMS, this information is less useful.

Brewtarget is pretty good. It's free, which is nice, and has most of the features Beersmith does.

I end up using Brewtoad for all my recipes and Beersmith mobile for strike water calculations

I tried BeerSmith but the interface is a hot mess of tabs. It's best features are the inventory that automatically changes as one brews recipes, and the cost / batch. But really, I don't see much utility from it over something like BrewTarget which is available open source. It isn't as fancy, but I've been using it for three years and went back to using it after trying BeerSmith.

http://www.brewtarget.org/

Download brewtarget http://www.brewtarget.org/ Its great at telling you what flavor qualities your recipe will have how much alcohol content it will contain and also comes with a few recipes of its own