Who uses it?
Worth it for extract recipes?
Will it tell you if a beer should turn out ok? If not, what exactly will it do?
Beersmith helps you design recipes and brew them. For instance, it helps you calculate water temps for all grain brewing. It will not tell you if a beer will turn out OK.
BeerSmith is nothing more than a tool to help you create, scale, tweak,store, and take notes on your beers as well as performing a lot of regular calculations used in brewing.
BeerSmith will not tell you how to brew or predict whether your beer will suck or be awesome.
So it wouldn’t tell me if I had too much DME or too few hops, etc?
In a sense it does. It estimates gravity, color, and hop bitterness among other things.
It will tell you how much you have. It won’t tell you if it’s too much or too little any more than a measuring tape will tell you if something is too long or short. You have to decide that.
You can compare your numbers to the style guide and get an idea. For example if your IPA has 14 ibus then the style guide will show that’s too low.
it helps calculate color, efficiency, IBU’s and compares all the input info to BJCP styles. I think it’s a bargain.
I find it very helpful on a number of fronts.
I lessthanthree this analogy.
I am fascinated by the word lessthanthree. Even as a phone autocorrect, I wonder about the derivation.
Btw, agree, BeerSmith will help if you are designing your recipe, extract or all grain, by computing predicted gravity, color and bitterness. If you are consuming recipes it may help with scaling or substituting ingredients. And it’s useful for tracking and inventory.
It’s a tool, not an advice column. The blog and podcast might be useful if that is your desire.
It has more utility in all grain where there are more degrees of freedom. Especially because in all grain, even the recipe is severely impacted by system specifics like efficiency, batch vs fly vs biab, and kettle/tun size and dynamics like specific heat.
In extract, most of those variable are removed. The software is useful, but you are only benefiting from a portion of the value.
Ok here it is in a nutshell… a few people have eluded to this but in a way yes beersmith will put you on the right track BUT you need to know how to use it properly. For extract it’s relatively easy, I would start by selecting the style of beer you want to brew ie. a IPA … next and this is where it can gettricky you need to setup your equipment profile if a preset one in the database doesn’t already exist and yes don’t let anyone BS you it can be difficult. By selecting the style first ie. IPA it will give you all the BJCP parameters to brew within the style. It does not directly tell you what ingedients to use. you need to search through the hops and it WILL give examples like Cascade hops good for pale ales, IPA, aroma and flavor etc…It will also give you the SRM based on how much of whatever LME or DME you are going use s you can tweek to stay in the guidelines… It will also tell you the OG ranges for example IPa 1.045-1.068 or something like that it will also calculate based on any of the 3 hop measuring tables tinsuth, rager ( or something like that) etc… so yes it can help put youon the right track but it is by no means a crystal ball that is why we may brew and change a recipe a dozen or more times until we finally hit the sweet spot we wanted. I personally am a huge believer in Beersmith if used properly anyone who says otherwise is entitled to their own opinion but I would guess they really didn’t set t up right or don’t fully understand what it’s capabilities or limitations are. I vote to get it.
I think he was trying to type <3, meaning “heart”. Such as “I <3 this analogy”
I didn’t think of that. I thought he was saying lessthanthree = 2 as in “I second this analogy”
I told my wife this morning before she left for work that I “less-than-three’d” her. She looked really confused.
That’s better than my wife would have taken it… she would have thought I was calling her a 3 on the scale so to speak. FWIW she is a very sensitive girly girl so your lucky she was only confused by you statement. I should say it to my wife too just for the laugh factor I’m a a$$ that way and deal with the fallout after 
Glad I could liven up your (and your wife’s) day!
She emailed me this morning from work “Now that I’ve had my coffee this morning, what did you call me as I was leaving?” After explaining it to her, she thought it was funny.
She has also been brewing with me lately and brewed a couple of her own batches, so she knows what Beersmith is and said “tell the guy on the homebrew forum that Beersmith is a great tool and he should get it.”
As a novice homebrewer (only brewing 2 batches thus far). I find BeerSmith to be a useful tool. I like the fact that I can look up most any grain, hop, yeast, or style of beer and get some information on it. I like seeing how the additions of certain grains can change the gravity while others barely budge it. I also enjoy the timer, being able to take notes, and create your own system setup that is exactly tuned to what you personally have.
Like others have said, It won’t tell you if your beer will turn out good or not, but it will provide a snapshot of just about everything you can imagine, so when you go back and analyze your brew day, temps, what happened when, etc, you have it all in one neat, easy place.