I"m in the market for a good cheap/free brewing software...whats everyone using and how good is it? I love the homebrew alchemist thats available on this site by guitarlord but I had to format my harddrive so I lost microsoft office. I'm trying out the evaluation version of promash, is there much difference between the evailuation and the purchase version? what else is out there?

I use ProMash and love it! I never had the trial, so I'm not sure what the difference is. I still discover things I can do with it that I didn't know about.

If you liked the Homebrew Alchemist, you'll love Beersmith! The Beersmith format was the basis behind the HBA, so there won't be a big learning curve to start using it. Try the free trial, you won't be dissapointed:
http://www.beersmith.com/download.htm

Cheers,
Dave

I'm a big fan of BeerTools - http://www.beertools.com

There is free online version which you can use and see if you like it and get a feel for it.

They also have BeerTools Pro which you can download. This program has some additional features that are not present in the online version.

BeerTools Pro has both PC and Macintosh versions which is nice especially if you are a Mac user like me.

The online version is fine for most purposes. I'm afraid I don't fully take advantage many of the added features of BeerTools Pro but do believe it is a very good program and highly recommend it.

By the way, I just noticed that there is now also a demo version of BeerTools Pro that you can download and play around with.

At any rate, check out BeerTools and see what you think.

- Scott

I stumbled upon Beersmith a couple of weeks ago and immediately was impressed with its features and capabilities. I'm looking forward to creating my own recipes with the software and for $21.95, I think it is well worth it.

I too am using a trial version. "Trial" in this case means you get use of the full version for 21 days. After that, some features are disabled and after 45 days the entire program is disabled. Not sure if that is true for the Promash trial.

Has Promash changed much in the last 5 years? I have a copy on old 3.5" floppy disks.

I have no idea if it's changed at all. It certainly doesn't look modern, but sure works great!

I downloaded Beersmith and Promash today...what do I do with them?

What I have been doing with my Beersmith is finding a recipe on line and plugging it into the program It will give you all of the information regarding your predicted values and target values based on the particular style of beer. As I am still a newbie, I hope to be able to start creating some recipes from scratch once I better understand the roles and characteristics of all of the ingredients and the brewing process in general. For the time being though, I can tweak a little bit here and there to play with my values. It's a great piece of software.

That's pretty much the goal for all of us. lol

I don't fully understand the whole values thing...looks like a lot of calculations. I was never that great at math...haha...one thing is certain, there is a lot more to brewing beer than just putting a bunch of ingredients in a pot and cooking it up!