So I’ve found myself very bad at documenting things…I’ve tried a few apps, but in the end, go back to paper/pen. Anyone find one in particular that they love? iBrewMaster2 was my go-to, since most of what I’d been doing were Northern Brewer kits, and they preload ~60% of the recipes, and the calculators are nice. But, looking to grow up a bit (or something…)
Open to suggestions if you’ve got any!
I use a spread of software to make my brews.
Recipe formulation And note taking: Beersmith 2.
Ibu clculations:Personal spreadsheet that is a modification of tinseth for my small batch setup (high % boil off)
Efficiency estimations, water volumes, temperatures, :my online calculatorHttp://Pricelessbrewing.github.io/BiabCalc
Water/mashpH and chemistry:Bru’n water
Yeast starters and harvesting:Brewunited
When you’re starting out its a good idea to get in the habit of recording everything. Strike temp and volume, first runnings temp, gravity, and volume, sparge volume and temp, second runnings gravity and volume, preboil gravity volume and temp, post boil volume temp and gravity. Any changes made to the recipe on brew day, any issues you encountered, anything that you felt was difficult or troublesome.
I use BeerSmith, but I am bad about transcribing notes into it. I also keep individual copies of Bru’n Water for each recipe for reference, but copy/paste the results page into BeerSmith.
So I switched out to a notebook for the last 10 batches or so, copying out my recipe from BeerSmith and fairly detailed notes every time I do something during the brew. The problem is consistency - each page looks different (not that it’s a bad thing). I just got a Brew Log to review and plan to brew with it a couple of times to see if the more structured organization is better.
I ise both Promash and pencil and paper. I’ on my 9th spiral notebook.
I take notes in the Beersmith mobile app. For Brunwater I enter the profile I use for the beer into Beersmith mobile with the salts amounts needed to achieve the profile.
For note taking Beersmith mobile just has a field where you type. It’s nothing fancy. The app also has a place to enter brewing session data (measure oh, volumes, gravities, etc)
I keep brew day recipes in the Beersmith cloud and then archive them on my PC via the Beersmith PC app.
Usually design my basic recipe on a scratch pad with basic notes, etc. Transpose and tweak in beersmith and bru’n water for chemistry. I save each bru’n water profile as its own named batch and beer for future batches in a separate folder. Brew day notes are written on my brew day sheet and transposed again to beersmith along with final notes once the beer gets packaged/kegged
I use Beersmith for the day of notes since I am faster at typing and its easier to edit. I then copy my notes from there and Bru’n Water into a nice brew log I was given as a wedding present. I figure I won’t loose the notebook but if my computer dies Ill still have the information.
Paper and pen for me. Just use a set of spreadsheets for recipe calc’s & print it out. Put notes on it, spill stuff on it, etc., then it goes into a big binder. I like my brew sessions to be fairly analogue…
Like Denny, I have a collection of steno books that I have filled over the years. While brewing software has come a long way over the years, nothing can replace pencil and paper when it comes to handling unstructured data. A well-kept brewing log can be a very powerful diagnostic tool.
Notebooks don’t crash or come out with crappy “upgrades.” That said I use software and have switched from one to another(beer alchemy to beersmith) bringing all of my batch data and unbrewerd draft recipes. That was painful. Every piece of software has its strengths and weaknesses, notebooks are pretty much paper and cardboard.
I too keep a written log, almost three books full now with batch #356 yesterday. I have a bunch on the PC using promash, but after a hard drive crash I am not sure how to recover that info - my original program is on floppy discs which doesn’t function well on the new PC. Since I tend to be migrating over to macs I am using beersmith lately, but I still like to keep a written record.
I have been working professionally with computers since the days of Hollerith punch cards. I have watched data format after data format get replaced over the span of my career. I have also watched character encoding and binary number encoding formats get replaced with newer formats. For example, the first computer on which I worked used 6-bit binary-coded decimal (BCD) for character encoding with an 18-bit word. Bit grouping was octal (0…7), not hexadecimal (0…F). This machine used one’s complement arithmetic for computations. Like 5-level paper tape and the Baudot code, one’s complement arithmetic is a footnote in history. Two’s complement won out long ago. However, there was a period when one had to be aware that negative numeric values were stored in one’s complement form when importing data into a two’s complement machine and vice versa. The weird thing about one’s complement arithmetic is that there is negative zero (all 1s) and positive zero (all 0s).
As an aside, the ~ operator in C is the 1’s complement operator whereas the unary - operator is the two’s complement operator.
This is what a page from one of my notebooks looks like…
Even though I use Beersmith, I still keep notebooks that look a lot like that, Denny. Old habits die hard !
FWIW, I use BeerTools Pro and input my notes directly into the “Notes” field in the app. My new recipe template is set up to start with the following already in there:
[quote] in mash; in boil. Mash pH ~, temperature °C.
1R: gal, °P; 2R: gal, °P.
Pre-boil: gal, °P. Boiled min.
Post-boil: gal, °P.
10 min whirlpool, 20 min hot stand. min KO (°C), aerated 10 min.
Pitched g slurry from # ( days post-harvest).
Pitched at °C; ramped to °C on day . Crashed to 1°C on day ; kegged on day .
Day : ~°P; day : ~°P;
[/quote]
Since I always have my laptop around to combat boredom during the brew day, this is convenient for me. Plus it spares me trying to decipher my own handwriting when I need to refer back to a recipe months or years later.
Edit to (shamelessly) add, I do have a couple stand-alone calculators for the things that BTP doesn’t do:
http://seanterrill.com/refractometer
http://seanterrill.com/batchsparge
I’ve dabbled with beer tools and have buddies that really like it. Have you compared it to beersmtih Sean?
Not too recently (it was still BeerSmith 1.x), but I did try out BeerSmith for the free period once. It seems like they’re basically in parity as far as features, but the BeerSmith interface strikes me as needlessly convoluted, especially in setting up all the equipment variables. And as a Mac user, it’s hard to get past the Windows-cribbed GUI, but of course that’s a relatively minor quibble.
Edit: Just to clarify, this is talking about BeerTools Pro, not the beertools.com recipe calculator.
The interface is one of my pain points as well. I loved beer alchemy, but the newest full version (2?) is a step back in my opinion. I kept with version 1 for as long as I could, but apple removed some of the resources that the iOS app needed about a year ago. So I jumped ship to beersmith because of the iOS app, but the app is pretty crappy.
I don’t want to switch again. 
I started with BeerSmith, and tried to switch to Beer Alchemy and BeerTools and found them so different that I gave up. I think I even paid for one of them (BeerTools) because I wanted to use it longer than the trial period. I think that I am so used to the BeerSmith UI and methodology that it is hard for me to swap paradigms. BeerSmith with the Cloud subscription works pretty well… I also trialed Brewer’s Friend, but just hate working through a web form…
But enjoying the conversion to paper - something a bit less structured, and have turned it into a bit of game - to see how close I get to gravity and IBU estimates as compared to BeerSmith and reality.
I gave Brewers Friend a solid try, but found it way too sluggish to work in a web based environment.