It’s been a couple of years since I’ve brewed. Any recommendations anyone might have on good homebrew software? thanks.
Beersmith or Promash. There are others but those are probably the best.
I spend all my time now on http://hopville.com
Al the software you need 
I’m a Promash lover. I’ve been trying to learn Beersmith, but I keep getting frustrated and going back to Promash.
Beersmith rocks the casbah! 
…but I also know plenty of Promash users who love it just as well. Like our one and only D.C. 8)
ProMash.
Oh did I say ProMash?
BeerSmith and ProMash seem to have the greatest following. I use Beersmith, and I like it.
What I would REALLY like is a PC based application that would synch with an IPhone based application.
I’m most fluent in Promash. Wish it would be updated/upgraded.
I’ve played around with BeerSmith, but something about it and me just don’t sync up.
I also use BeerToolsPro quite a bit.
As a Mac user who refuses to infect my by running a paralell windows OS, I use BeerAlchemy. It’s pretty straightforward, and you can make it sync with an iPhone or iPad.
That would be cool if there was a PC program that could do that. I run my Beersmith on our main PC but I often wish I could run it on our netbook or my IPod while I’m brewing and sync it. Oh well- I’ll keep wishing.
This is sort of on-topic about Beersmith.
There is a computer-geek way to sort-of sync up Beersmith on multiple computers in your house. I have a linux computer set up as a file server and share out directories via Samba. Bascially, I import the current version of my recipes.bsm to whichever computer I need to work on and make sure I export it back to the network when I’m finished.
The pros of doing this is I can access all my recipes from either of my two computer. The cons, beersmith was not designed for network usage, so getting stuff into your brewlog and calendar and such doesn’t work.
Also, it doesn’t work with linux, but I haven’t seen a decent program that can, so I have to have at least one windows computer/VM set up somewhere.
Actually you can do this.
Export your Beersmith recipes one at a time as a BeerXML file. You’ll need to purchase BeerAlchemy for your iPod Touch, but that will allow you to import BeerXML files onto your iPod Touch and work with recipes in your brewery.
It has a neat feature that will allow you to create a “batch” from a recipe. The batch will allow you to edit it if your hop alphas or something else differs in your recipe on brewing day. You can capture your batch gravities and other data too. Then you can go back to Beersmith and enter the batch data in your brew log.
It’s not the most integrated way to do it, but it does the trick nicely.
I 
Beersmith!
I actually have the entire program folder on a shared network drive and can run it from any PC/Laptop in the house. Which is handy when I can’t have access to a certain PC. ( Ever try to tell the wife to get off Facebook so I can check a beer recipe? :o )
You sir, might be a genius
It never crossed my mind to just run the program from a share, good-bye to import/export hassles from computer to computer!
“To the Cloud!”
I regularly run BS off my flash drive, or use Remote Desktop when I just want to check something.
Helpful hint:Instead of your shortcut pointing to Beersmith.exe, setup your shortcut to point to “Scratch.bsm”. That way it will load the same scratchpad every time you startup.
Hey, I never thought of that! I could just run the Beersmith shared from the main PC. Remote Desktop isn’t a bad idea either. I’ve been putting off setting up a better home network. Going to have to get on that!
I think the best solution is to store everything in “the cloud” so it can be accessed from not just any computer in the house but wherever you go. There are countless websites that offer these services and don’t require carrying an easy to loose usb stick around. Something like http://www.filesanywhere.com/ or http://www.sharefile.com/filetransfer/remote-file-storage.aspx might work. Google is going after a model of storing everything in the cloud with there Chrome OS that is just a browser basically with everything stored remotely.
I like the idea but haven’t played around much with it yet. hopville.com is something like the facebook of brewers but there could be room for more professional brew software like proMash to go in the direction of a web based application so it can be accessed from any phone as an app or the web browser.
Another option is to use a file share program like Dropbox. Just save your beersmith recipe file there and you can access it from anywhere provided the computer you are accessing it from has beersmith installed. I brew with my dad and brother, so this is very helpful when one of us wants to go in a edit a recipe, or add a new one.
I’ll stick with the program on the shared drive on my own network. I just got it all sync’d with my backup .bsm and it works GREAT!
From a security standpoint, which I sort of do for a living, RDP and “cloud” type stuff wouldn’t allow me to make sure everything is all tidy and secure. But, if you can’t set up a file server, those two options are great!