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Best Free Homebrew (Beer Recipe) Software

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  Go straight to the Quick Selection Guide
Introduction

One of the key aspects of homebrew is recipe formulation and management. Creating a tasty brew that meets the characteristics of its target style is no easy task, involving many calculations and variables (color, bitterness, specific gravity, etc). So it's not surprising that there are several homebrew software programs such as QBrew, CyberBrau, DrewBrew, ProMash, Strangebrew and SUDS, available to assist with these crucial tasks.

After reviewing all of these programs, two freeware products are recommended.

Discussion

PQBrewFor an excellent freeware homebrew recipe program, QBrew is the only, but very deserving, choice. It has an intuitive and simple interface and is excellent for formulating recipes quickly (about half the time as BeerSmith, a commercial program). Recipe entry and ingredient database management is extremely simple. Each recipe is stored in a separate file and can be exported in BeerXML format for sharing and/or importing into other BeerXML-enabled applications such as BeerSmith. The summary pane also lists the maximum and minimum gravity, bitterness, and color levels according to standardized style definitions published by the Beer Judge Certification Program. This is useful if you're brewing for a competition, or targeting a particular style.

QBrew's recipe calculations seem to be more accurate than BeerSmith's, but don't accept that as a guarantee! Home brewing systems vary in efficiency and the calculation results are served as guidelines. Both BeerSmith and QBrew can be extracted from the installation archive and run from a USB flash drive.

CyberBrauFor those interested in a web-based beer recipe application for a personal web site and then accessed from anywhere, CyberBrau is very appealing. It features recipe formulation and management, batch tracking, a reviewing system, and other useful utilities. It also supports multiple users and is great for sharing recipes, tracking batches through the entire process, and sharing comments on recipes.

Many thanks to Craig Vollmar for preparing the original review on which this article is based.

Quick Selection Guide

QBrew
9
 
Gizmo's Freeware award as the best product in its class!

Runs as a stand-alone program on a user's computer
Intuitive and simple interface, formulate recipes quickly, simple database management, export to BeerXML format, useful summary pane.
http://www.usermode.org/code.html
0.4.1
4.2 MB
Unrestricted freeware
This product is portable
Windows98-XP, Mac OSX, Linux, Unix

The program can be extracted from the installation archive and run from a USB flash drive.

CyberBrau
8
 
Combines a web service with a stand-alone program
Web-based, features recipe formulation and management, supports multiple users, great for sharing recipes and tracking batches.
Additional Software Required: PHP 4+ and MySQL.
http://cyberbrau.sourceforge.net/
0.9.4a
1.4 MB
Unrestricted freeware
Windows (IIS 5+ or Apache), Linux (Apache)

Editor
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Tags

home brew, home brew software, free beer recipe, beer recipe software, freeware

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Comments

by user21 (not verified) on 27. July 2011 - 4:02  (76283)

http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator

This one does the job for homebrewers

by Anonymous on 23. February 2010 - 4:19  (44220)

Here's Another!

BrewMate, the free, light-weight and easy-to-use beer recipe designer.
http://www.brewmate.net

Many Thanks Rob.

by keztag on 21. November 2009 - 4:44  (37032)

I've been using this brewing web site for years:

http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator


It's an excellent recipe editor and there are also a lot of great recipes (for ideas) posted in the “Recipes” section. Also, check out the Home page as there are links to a couple useful brewing calculators.
by Anonymous on 17. November 2009 - 13:23  (36765)

Another alternative to add to the list:

http://www.brewtoolz.com

by Anonymous on 6. October 2009 - 1:17  (34002)

Not too bad!

Make Your Own Beer

by Anonymous on 9. June 2009 - 19:21  (23439)

There is a free spreadsheet that rivals the software packages called Diesel's Brewing Spreadsheet: http://dieseldrafts.com/

by BruGuy on 15. September 2009 - 18:16  (32671)

I looked at the software and I liked what I saw. I'll post this into a review coming soon.

by Anonymous on 9. September 2009 - 16:50  (32407)

I'll look into this one.
Thanks for the note.
BruGuy

by Anonymous on 9. June 2009 - 12:52  (23407)

An excellent article.

by Anonymous on 26. October 2008 - 5:30  (9651)

I'd like software that actually makes beer.

by Anonymous on 9. September 2009 - 16:53  (32409)

Only thing better would be raining beer!

by Anonymous on 22. September 2008 - 23:25  (8162)

Any home still/spirit making software?

by Anonymous on 9. September 2009 - 16:54  (32410)

None that I know of right now.

by gizmo (not verified) on 6. April 2008 - 7:16  (2)

I'd like to see this expanded to include home wine-making software

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