Which Software?

[DeadFall]

I'm just wondering what the pros/cons of each of the available packages are? There's loads out there, it would be good to hear from users what they're like.

[gibbiem]

I use beersmith on my phone. It's ok but messed up my mash figures! I set up my equipment and used 2.5l per kilo of grain but the figure it gave me was more than that resulting in having to drain a bit of water off to get all my grain in. Thankfully the beer is still pretty decent

[boingy]

Beersmith for me, although I mostly only use the recipe and inventory stuff. The user interface was designed by someone on speed and the water profile stuff is a bit clunky but creating and fiddling with recipes is a breeze. Before that I used ProMash which also did the job but has not been updated since the Romans left.

I did mess about with a few tablet apps for brew day before realising that I much prefer a single, expendable sheet of paper. You can scribble on it and it survives when you drop it.

[nakeda]

I'll put a word in for BrewMate (http://www.brewmate.net/),which I've been using for the past few years. Does everything I need and has always been accurate for my BIAB system. The built in calculators for water dilution, gravity temp adjustments, carbonation volumes and ABV are all useful. It's free, but my only gripe is that it requires Windows, so for Linux I need to run it in a VM.

Before that I used the web-based Hopville.com which is now Brewtoad.com - haven't tried it since they switched owners.

[vacant]

I'm using Joliebulle. Obviously it does what I need. I like it because it looks nice, relying on QT. It's written in python so I can hack it and when I suggested a bug-fix the main guy submitted it immediately (though maybe sending a bug report in French helped as he's Swiss). I wrote a script to do the grunt-work converting my Beer Engine recipes to Joliebulle XML files.

So no more Wine on Linux - which is good as I mostly use Arch on a Samsung ARM Chromebook.

"It's probably not for everyone"? Hmm, it's probably only for one or two people who like tinkering. Works on Windows, Mac, Linux

http://joliebulle.tuxfamily.org/pages/telechargements

Now, the help comes up in French. I did have that working in English in the previous version. Must have lost a locale setting or something.

[Hanglow]

I use Brewtarget. http://www.brewtarget.org/

It's free, looks good, works great and is easy to use

I don't think it has an inventory or water treatment for ph/salts but it has everything else I need

[Clibit]

I'm a big fan of Brewmate. Easy to use, has everything I need, does the job really well. And free.

[Wezzel]

Brewpal is very good on ipad or iphone.

[Hanglow]

I think we can deduce that there are plenty of good options then

[Dave S]

I've used Beersmith for the past 18 months or so. Before that I use Brew Target and BrewMate, both of which are good free apps.

[donny70]

Brewpal is very good on ipad or iphone.

I second that for ease of use. Doesn't adjust the hop utalisation for smaller boils with a higher gravity though. Not much of a problem for me as I only do 12L brews from an 8L boil. Still my go to app.

[Befuddler]

BeerSmith is my favourite. Seems the most in-depth to me. You have to spend a bit of time getting all your equipment parameters entered properly, but once you've got it set up its predictions are pretty accurate.

[DeadFall]

I've been playing with beersmith, but a few friends have pointed me to http://www.brewersfriend.com/. Any one got any experience with this? It looks pretty decent, but how well does it work?

[pads72]

I use BeerAlchemy on my iPad, I find it good, but I didn't pay the £14 they seem to be charging for it now!!

[Stapsin]

I use BeerAlchemy on my iPad, I find it good, but I didn't pay the £14 they seem to be charging for it now!!

I'm a beer alchemy guy too. Use if on my laptop, think it's a pretty good app all in all few things that could be improved though.