Beersmith Enhancements?

[rcrabb22]

According to my copy of Beersmith, it appears there have been no significant enchancments to BS in 3 years. I can find no roadmap or enhancment plans on their website. It is a little disappointing that author(s) are not trying to improve or enhance the software, at least to my knowledge.

Enhancements I would like:

be able to have both the inventory view and the recipe build view open at the same time. Sometimes a recipe is built from what I have rather than from other formula. Drag and drop of an inventory item would be nice here too

have an inventory list filtered by ingredient type similar to when building a recipe, but at the inventory view. I realize it can be sorted but sometimes I just want to look at hops inventory

ability to have real time shopping list window open as the recipe is built rather than build a shopping list in multiple steps as needed today.

I'm sure I could think of more if I put more time into it. Anybody else have ideas?

 

[stevo155]

Brad Smith has seemed pretty busy these days ( new Podcast and Book just released ). He has posted on the Beersmith forums that version 2.0 is in the works http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php?topic=2341.0

You should post these suggestions over on the Beersmith page.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

v1.4 saw several very signifigant enhancments at realease date.

 

[3 Dog Brew]

Compared to ProMash, BeerSmith is at least on some sort of update cycle with Version 2.0 in the works. While I agree that a Roadmap would be helpful, I'm not willing to pay the big corporate expense that a software architect would charge to put together a market driven strategy.

As a software developer, that's just my 2 pence.

 

[rcrabb22]

v1.4 saw several very signifigant enhancments at realease date.

on August 5, 2007.......

I'm not trying to start a flame war. After using Beersmith for 2 years I have found some things that could be improved. No harm in asking for them.

 

[adam01]

Brad moved to entrepreneur and quit his day job.
He's working on BS to finish it.

 

[rcrabb22]

Brad moved to entrepreneur and quit his day job.
He's working on BS to finish it.

Cool! I am trying to help with suggestions.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

I guess it a perspective thing. I came from an antiquated ProMash (no revisions since 2003) to Beersmith and very soon after v1.4 was released, which was a major improvement and and has worked flawlessly ever since.

I get where you are coming from and am in no way condemning you for it but....

 

[knightbeer39]

on August 5, 2007.......

I'm not trying to start a flame war. After using Beersmith for 2 years I have found some things that could be improved. No harm in asking for them.

Yup, quite frankly, I have been disappointed in the lack of updates myself. I still love the software and use it religiously, but there are definite improvements that could be made to make it better.

-Add "carastan" for example in the grain section.

-Improve how it calculates what temp strike water needs to be for different mash tuns. I added all the info for my keggle mt, and it's not even close. Usually stables out a good 4-7 degrees MORE than the target temp.

-IMO the shopping list thing is a waste of time. The prices vary so much I don't have time to go correcting them every couple of months. If there was some way to just batch update them, that would be great. I like that it keeps an inventory, but who has time to add all the prices of umpteen million ingredients?

I have other requests, but I just can't remember them all right now....

-

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

-Add "carastan" for example in the grain section.

You can do this yourself in the current version.

-Improve how it calculates what temp strike water needs to be for different mash tuns. I added all the info for my keggle mt, and it's not even close. Usually stables out a good 4-7 degrees MORE than the target temp.

This sounds more like you need to re-adjust the thermal mass in the equipment setup.

-IMO the shopping list thing is a waste of time. The prices vary so much I don't have time to go correcting them every couple of months. If there was some way to just batch update them, that would be great. I like that it keeps an inventory, but who has time to add all the prices of umpteen million ingredients?

Agreed. But, if you are updating the inventory as you add ingredients, then why change the price from what you paid at the time?

 

[3 Dog Brew]

on August 5, 2007.......

I'm not trying to start a flame war. After using Beersmith for 2 years I have found some things that could be improved. No harm in asking for them.

Nope. Agree with you completely. Like GilaMinumBeer, having come from ProMash as well, I still feel BeerSmith is much better than anything else out there. This includes BeerTools which I bought a year membership to and THEN found out I hated it.

There are plenty of things that work, but could be better in BeerSmith as well. For instance, I have tried to create my own mash profile for my RHIMS system where the mash tun is pre-heated before the grains go in. While I could continue to mess with it until I made it work, the design could make this process more intuitive. I also think the shipping list/inventory could be better, although I haven't looked at creating some custom reports to get what I want. I also really like that I can export all my recipes to html which I have published here.

 

[SPLASTiK]

I posted these tool suggestions on their Suggestions part of the forum:

1. Boil strength (best term I can come up with to describe)... I periodically take refractometer readings during the boil and tweak the strength of the boil to make sure I'm on target to hit my numbers as wind, propane pressure, etc. can affect the (e)vaporation rate. Example: Preboil is 10P and you're aiming for 12P postboil then over a 60 minute boil every 15 minutes you should theoretically see a difference of about 0.5P. I envision a simple "Tool" where you fill in variables of Preboil gravity, Target Postboil Gravity, Boil length, and time into the boil.

2. Boil volume temp adjustment. I like that you allow us to compensate for the 4% cooling loss from boil to chilling. I'd like to see a similar thing for boil volume as water expands a couple percent at mash temps. I think the efficiency spreadsheet calculator at BrauKaiser.com allows this... I typically just multiply my preboil by 2% to determine how much I need to collect though a more accurate method might be cool based on actual expansion of water at a measured temp.

3. Kettle inches. My brew kettle is approx .95"/gallon and I use a metal yard stick to determine the boil volume, so a tool where I can type in the boil volume I need to collect multiplied by inches/gallon (maybe combined with temp adjustment above which I apply after) would be handy.
--------

I didn't get a response... however someone made a thread about how it would be cool to have a mini browser window inside Beersmith instead of just making a billion tools and he replied he'd look into it. I think that'd be great, I'd just make a simple page for my own extra tools.

 

[keiths]

How about just a simple File / Save or a save button, instead of having to click on another recipe just so it will ask you to save the one you are working on.

 

[JonW]

How about just a simple File / Save or a save button, instead of having to click on another recipe just so it will ask you to save the one you are working on.

Mine seems to auto-save whenever I move away to another screen. I never need to "save" what I'm doing.

 

[keiths]

And thats my whole point, You HAVE to go to a different part of beer smith to get it to save.
But what if you have a computer crash while your working on a recipe and it wont auto save then. That has happened to me before. I would like to be able to save as I am working on it. Any program I have ever seen has a File / Save function. Well except Beersmith that is.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

If there wer anything I would suggest be changed;

It would be to allow for "Gallons" as a measure of Grains, Sugar, Extract for things like Coffee additions, or juices, you know those pesky things we add to beer that come in a liquid form.

Beats having to weigh out volumes.