Inventory/Recipe management software

[mredge73]

I haven't kept up with all the new software that has come out over the last few years. It takes me hours to plan a brew day between searching for recipes that fit my inventory, using multiple spreadsheets for water and volume calculations, and brewmate for recipe construction. Some days I walk into my garage/brewery just wanting to make something. Has something been developed that can suggest recipes based off of at hand inventory?

 

[shanecb]

Hmm not that I know of, but I like that idea. Sort of like the websites where you can punch in the food you have, and it tells you what recipes you could make.

 

[day_trippr]

Ironically, on an absolute level this type of problem was pretty much solvable back in the unit record era

You'd construct a database of quasi-representative recipes for every style in which one has an interest. A record with the amounts of every ingredient, for each recipe, for a handy unit volume, like 1 gallon. You'd bang your current list of ingredients on hand and look for compatible recipes at that 1 gallon volume, then have the program tell you how much of each compatible recipe you could make.

The construct would be as broad, deep, and precise as one wanted.
For breadth, if you don't ever see brewing sours, cask ales or Saisons, you wouldn't code them.

For depth, you probably don't actually need to code a hundred recipes for a style - though you'd want to code enough of them to cover some variation in ingredients.

For precision...well, that gets interesting. The program would need to have some run-time adjustments to cover cases, like, you have everything needed to make a nice ESB, except you have C40 and the closest potential match wants C60, so you don't get a "hit" on that one. A slider that would increase the matchable scope of characteristics like color would be handy - you could set it to "+/-20" for crystal malts and get a hit, then make adjustments as needed.

So, sure. It could be done...

Cheers!

 

[mredge73]

I end up doing a lot of substitutions in recipes as many hops and grains can be substituted for others.
I would like to see hits here as well as I often sub pilsner for 2-row and CTZ for any high alpha hop.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

There used to be a way to do this in beersmith. That is, you could do a custom search of recipes using inventory. Not sure if it still works tho'.

"run the "find" function from the "Edit" menu to search by a list of ingredients or all ingredients you have in inventory. You can also loosen the search to specify number of matching ingredients."

 

[day_trippr]

Here's the Recipe Search pane from the latest BS2.something.



Basically, it selectively parses the search string, with "Any" or "All" matches.
There's no function that scans recipes looking for inventory matches.
Too bad - there's like 90% of what's needed in BS to do it...

Cheers!

 

[andycook]

Does that search more than just my recipes?

 

[day_trippr]

There are actually two search tools:
- Recipe Search will look through all the recipes on your local system, whether yours or imports.
- Recipe Cloud Search, which will paw through all the shared recipes on the BeerSmith Cloud.

While neither will bang the recipes against your inventory, you can put a recipe's worth of inventory items in the search string, set it to match "All Items", and see what it finds...

Cheers!

 

[RTL]

Looks like BS has a very similar functionality to this:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/search/

The brewers friend one doesn't check your recipes just the public ones, and also doesn't check your inventory (yet, I keep requesting it), or allow for comparison of amounts . But this part of the website is free to the public.

 

[NothingRhymesWithCurtiss]

You can kind of do it on Brewtoad: http://www.screencast.com/t/zQxBxzTh It's not perfect, but it has helped me.

 

[mredge73]

Looks like BS has a very similar functionality to this:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/search/

The brewers friend one doesn't check your recipes just the public ones, and also doesn't check your inventory (yet, I keep requesting it), or allow for comparison of amounts . But this part of the website is free to the public.

I spent a bunch of time entering my inventory in brewers friend the other day but couldn't figure out how to make it consider stock when searching for recipes. It has come a long way since I used it last but still lacks inventory management.