Not too long ago I posted an Irish Red Ale recipe I generated using BeerTools Pro, and I said I would post a review of the software once I had some experience with it.
I have used this software to formulate about 20 recipes thus far. Converting some of my old recipes and using it to formulate new ones. I have also used it several times to check calculations and make approximations about other peoples recipes that I find online. I use it to help guide questions I see in several online forums occasionally too.
Highlights:
The ingredient database is extensive and thorough. The database is extremely easy to make additions too as well. I have already added some special ingredients like oak chips, a specific brand of vanilla extract and cocoa powder. I even made an entry for Johnnie Walker Red that I put in my Holiday Ale. You can easily adjust the properties of ingredients in the recipe without changing the entry in the database. For example, if the English Chocolate Malt you pull out of the database has a Lovibond rating of 350, but your actual chocolate malt in hand is 300L, you can make an Edit in the recipe, not the database. I think this is better than polluting your database with entry changes every time you get a new batch of malt. The most useful example would be updating your hops Alpha Acid rating.
The interface is clean and easy to use. It takes a short time to get used to where to find everything, but it works very nicely. Scaling recipes for batch size is easy. Scaling for sparge efficiency is easy. You can even scale the numbers based on your attenuation if you know what it is (maybe this is useful for a post brewing report).
A very nice feature is a little subtle set of arrows that let you compare your recipe agains all the BJCP Style Guidelines. For instance, if you create a Brown Ale recipe, you can quickly see how it compares to the several different versions of Brown Ale. What’s even cooler is scrolling through all the styles to see how your recipe compares. I made an ESB and noticed that my numbers were damn close to English IPA. Information like that lets your think about how your beer is going to taste, and what mods are necessary to push an ESB into the IPA range. You can also imagine how an American Amber beer and a German Altbier can come about with the same ingredients conceptually, but you would have to substitute German Hops and German yeast to make the beer actually taste the to style, but still use the basic recipe format. (That would be an interesting experiment)
There are extensive online forums at the BeerTools site that are useful too. Which was helpful getting over some of the low points.
Low Points:
I am a batch sparger, so first figuring out how to get BeerToolsPro how to appropriately do that was difficult. It is not entirely flexible but you can get it to show what you intend to do in the brew house with some practice. BeerTools calls this process scheduling. A completed schedule does make a nice graph of the temperature and volume changes in the mash. However, that graph is rather unexciting if you just do a single infusion.
My second big complaint is that BeerToolsPro doesn’t generate a neat printable report for your records. I like to keep a binder of my recipes and my brewing notes for each batch. BTP only offers a text export feature that you can paste into word, or onto websites. If you want a report to look at though you have to print it out. The print out is fine, but it uses two pages. I slimmer more trimmed style of report would be better for record keeping in my mind. There developers are currently working on a reporting feature for subsequent releases, so we’ll see how that works out.
Lastly, BTP is a popular program, but it isn’t as nearly popular as Promash (another package). There is no universal way to convert recipes between file formats in this case. However, entering an Promash printout into BTPs helps you learn more about the way BTP works (especially when dealing with IBUs). So I have actually enjoyed converting some recipes manually and tweaking the settings to get my numbers to match the Promash spec sheets from other brewers.
Overall, I really like having the BTP software. I have been logging my recipes and making a sort of library of my recipes. I also have been making recipes that I want to brew and experiment with. I simply name these things like Dry Stout#1, after I brew it I will make tweaks to the recipe and save it as Dry Stout#2. I already have an ESB#2 started. I haven’t tried the other software programs out there yet, although I could for free trials. (Promash and BeerSmith offer trial versions)
I would recommend BTPs for anyone willing to use it. I took a chance on it despite not being able to use a trial version, and it works for me (maybe I was just sucked into the more professional looking website of BeerTools).
My only disclaimer is that using brewing software is still no substitute for being able to handle some of the basic math in brewing by hand. Calculating IBUs is hard to do on paper, but calculating gravity and dilutions if wort and water volumes, I believe, are math skills every brewer should be able to do without the aid of software.
