The Brew Dudes received an email from Larry at Brewer’s Friend letting us know they had an early release of their recipe builder. I used it today and it’s pretty good.
The design is clean and self- intuitive. I found the functionality of adding ingredients and/or deleting mistakes pretty easy to follow. All malts, adjuncts, and sugars are in a dropdown under the Fermentables heading and you can select them for your recipe.
The hop addition functionality works a bit differently. Varieties are presented once you start typing in the open field. After the one you are looking to use is presented, the typical alpha acid is carried with it to your recipe calculation. You can modify this percentage though, which is nice because sometimes the package of hops you have may have lower or higher than the average.
The yeast list is up to date and has strains from the big producers.
It has other sections where you can enter in spice, herb, or other additions and one to describe your water chemistry.
Overall, it’s similar to other tools you have used in the past and I think that’s a good thing. I give it high marks for its layout and its font/text box size.
There are a couple of things I would change to make it even better.
1. Maybe this is just me, but I know yeast strains by their number and not their descriptor. WLP001 means more to me than California Ale yeast. When I was using the dropdown to dial in the yeast strain I wanted, it took me a while to find the one I was looking for. If the strains were ordered by the code number, it would help me to find the strain faster. Again, maybe that’s what I am used to with other tools so maybe it’s not a big deal.
2. I think the “Matches Style” indication needs to be a little more detailed. Style Guidelines have many facets and a pass/fail grade may not be helpful enough. What I would like to know is how close I am to style for all the top level guidelines like color, starting gravity, IBUs, etc. so I know what to change in the recipe to make it fit the style.
Good stuff. If you would like to check it out, please go to http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator/
Larry
I think a lot of people are missing the triangle next to OG in the grey bar. You can plus that open and see more about the style, change equations for IBU/SRM, etc. In the next release we are adding a ‘More…’ button to make that easier to find.
mark taylor
I like it.
I normally don’t use brewing software and rely on pencil and paper but I bookmarked this site for an easy way of developing new styles that I haven’t brewed yet. Thanks for the connection.
mark
Beer Diary…