How about a what NOT to buy thread?

[Pudge]

That's just it for me... too many options. I know. Sounds crazy. It's like walking into a pizza shop that offers 85 toppings or maybe a restaurant where the menu includes full Italian, Mexican, Chinese, and American menus. I don't need that. All I need is recipe design and water calculations. I use the hell out of BrewMate and rarely touch Beersmith.

[Gymrat]

What's wrong with BeerSmith?

I love beersmith. I can put my recipes in the cloud then they are there for me to use on my tab when weighing out my grains. Plus my tab then has a timer I can set for hop additions. On top of that a number of us here share our recipes through the beersmith cloud. It has an inventory thing where I can track all of my grains and hops. And a shopping kart that it adds to as I brew my beer. When I add to the inventory I tell it what I paid for my stuff. Then as I brew it tells me to the penny how much I paid for the ingredients. There are so many wonderful things about beersmith that no other software I have ever tried even begins to match. I tell it what kind of equipment I have and it is always within a point or two of the OG of my beer.

[HerbMeowing]

Stinkfist wrote:
"How much time did you spend with it? I personally love it, it has so many options and things you could not do in Regular Beersmith too each their own I guess."

Spent more than enough time with BS2 to know how much I dislike it.
There are a few useful features but overall it comes up short ... especially the lame water tool which is the same all but useless POS found in BS1.4

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The layouts are an abuse of screen space.
Ribbons blow chunks.
Why doesn't the mouse-wheel scroll the page up and down?

The interface is little more than warmed over MS Access forms.
Too many fookin'decimal places as if home brewers enjoy such precision.

Can't update any prices is BS can't find ONE item in any of your bills.

Yeast viability depends on package date.
Not all MFGRs indicate their package. Many use 'best by.'

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Why do I have to double-click to see the water:grain and other info?

'Select fields' just adds fields to the bottom of the list.
What about the wasted real estate to the right?

Why don't the slider bars slide? A pop-up doesn't cut it in 2015.

Nuff said.

[JohnSant]

Don't know what all the fuss is about BeerSmith2 I like it (just need to figure out how to get where I want to be in the program).

[BlackDuck]

I don't think the slider bars are supposed to slide. They are simply a visual of where your recipe stands in the BJCP style guidelines, which are given in numbers to the right of the bars. Sliding them to adjust the recipe would be very difficult. For example (using the picture above), IBU's are at 44.6 which is right in the middle range of the chosen Old Ale style. But if you wanted it to be a little higher, say around 55 IBU's and you were able to simply slide the marker on the bar to 55, how would BeerSmith now which hop additions to adjust to reach 55? There are so many ways to increase the IBU's. You could adjust only a 60 minute addition; or you could leave the 60 minute addition alone and adjust the flavor additions; or you could only adjust the aroma additions; or a combination of any of these. But each one alone could change the outcome of the original recipe drastically. BeerSmith wouldn't and couldn't know how many IBU's your trying to achieve with each hop addition.

As for the decimal places, if BeerSmith rounded up, 13.5 gallons would be rounded up to 14. When it comes to hitting gravities, a half gallon of water can make a huge difference. The same can be said for grain weight. There's a big difference between 1.25 pounds of crystal 40 or if it was automatically rounded down to 1 pound.