Madbrewer wrote:
Are you trying to write something for your use that understands your current 'ways' of doing things? Or are you trying to take on the promash & beersmith for a share of their customer base?
It started off for my own private use. It had is origins in the 1980's, written for a Sinclar QL, indeed, many of the empirical formulae that I developed then are still used in this current reincarnation. The main reason for knocking it into some sort of distributable shape was Daabs encouragement to do so.
It is not necessarily my intention to do something that understands my current 'ways' of doing things, but hopefully the
proper way of doing things from the perspective of the 6.4 billion people in the world that happen to not be American. Most of the brewing software available to us is basically American cast-offs, frigged to approximate the methods of the rest of the world; usually not very well.
I do not have much experience with Beersmith because it stopped working before I had chance to evaluate it, and I'm not going to pay for it. One of the problems I had with Promash, apart from its unnecessary complexity, was its inflexible one-size-fits-all approach. This is particularly apparent when it comes to hop utilisation - basically four options: two of which are in cloud-cuckoo-land, one that is reasonable or good enough, and another that I am not quite sure what it means. The big issue is that none of these methods are adjustable. You are stuck with them - as they are - like it or not.
So basically I have tried to do something that is unadulterated with unnecessary junk and is not bogged down by inappropriate beer styles - just designs or verifies recipes - forwards, backwards, sideways, anyway you like, but just recipes - with the right answers. It works fundamentally in metric, IoB, EBC etc, so there is no frigging about between standards, anything that needs to be adjustable by the end user, is adjustable by the end user (or will be). And free, of course.
Madbrewer wrote:
Yours actually looks uncluttered compared to beer smith. Great for a beginner & Also in it's current form makes a really good starting point for generating your own recipes. I actually think your 'next' book (after the abridged one) could perhaps come with a CD containing this as part of the 'bundle' .... So I think there's a certain appeal its current simplicity and with the added 'european' recipes as discussed it would have great appeal too! I for one would certainly love to see future versions of this program.
I think that a book becomes eligible for VAT once a CD is bundled with it. That would knock its price up by about 20%
If and when I have finished it, I will try to find a (safe) way for it to be redistributed. A big fear is it being tampered with by the low-life of this world.
just about to download - Thanks Graham!
I can't make it crash. How many clicks is too much?
