Survey: what software (or not) do you use?

[daedalus12]

Over the past few years of brewing, I've tried most of the major options for recipe planning and brew day calculators. Although they get the job done, they all seem to be lacking or buggy in various ways.

I'm considering taking a crack at creating my own app from scratch, but would love to get some feedback from the community before diving any further down that rabbit hole.

If you've got 1-2 minutes to spare, I'd greatly appreciate you taking this survey:
https://goo.gl/forms/YaMBIzTOlyJuwcqF2

Cheers!

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Obviously skewed perspective, but I filled it out.

Before embarking on your own software, I would consider joining one of the current groups of devs.

Brewtarget being the largest open source group.

I'm also working on a new bootstrap 1 page webapp (which will be downloadable as well), which will (at least no plans to at the moment) have no backend but instead will use html5 file api and local storage as well as beerJSON data structure to allow users to either backup locally or use a cloud service of their choosing. If you're interested in helping, you're more than welcome to hop aboard. It's just me atm, but I can move it to a repo if you'd like.

I really wish keg.ninja or brewingday would go open source free software, as I like what they're doing too.

 

[daedalus12]

So far the results are:

40% Beersmith
15% Brewtarget
10% Brewer's Friend

There's a few I'd never heard of!

Brewing Day (https://www.brewingday.net) is actually pretty close to the interface that I had in mind.

 

[Smellyglove]

I've never used brewing day myself except for just mocking up something and see how it works. The dev is on my local forum and throws out bugfixes and features left and right from the feedback he's getting.

 

[daedalus12]

One of the really key features I'd like to have would be a side-by-side comparison of different brew sessions of the same recipe. For people familiar with git, it would be be like git-diff for your brew log. The idea would be to make it very easy to see what was different between two different brew sessions; they show up side by side, and anything that varies between the two is highlighted.

I think this could be great for dialing in a recipe or diagnosing process issues. Does that sound useful to anyone else?

 

[r4dyce]

One of the really key features I'd like to have would be a side-by-side comparison of different brew sessions of the same recipe. For people familiar with git, it would be be like git-diff for your brew log. The idea would be to make it very easy to see what was different between two different brew sessions; they show up side by side, and anything that varies between the two is highlighted.

I think this could be great for dialing in a recipe or diagnosing process issues. Does that sound useful to anyone else?

Yes it does.
I would also suggest a "rating " of your brews as well. Maybe a 1-10 rating for quick reference. I don't have an expansive list of brews but I can see it being useful to look back and see oh which one of these Porter recipes did I like was it A or B ?
Similarly to comparing brew days you could see maybe your mash was higher this time but you liked it better, or maybe you were short a couple ounces of Hop X so you used Hop Y and liked it better , so comparison of ingredients might be helpful too.