BeerSmith 2.0

Another beautiful piece I’ve recently picked up and not had a chance to use (first time Hunter’s Irish Red!) is BeerSmith 2.0.  I’ve been playing with this for a few hours now, and all I can say is… WOW!

It has all the math involved in recipe design and the brewing process itself built right in.  So far, I have input my equipment profile, my water profile, and downloaded recipe samples from several different popular brewing retailers and blogs.  I have played around with designing an Irish Red recipe and the ability to quickly change from one grain type to another, or swap hops and have a bunch of little sliders adjust from the red zone through yellow to the green zone in several characteristics of your beer is a pretty nice thing.

 

Beer Craft

Got this little gem for Christmas from my awesome sister.  Beer Craft by William Bostwick and Jessi Rymill is one of the most information dense and entertaining instruction/reference manual.  There are a number of visually interesting and well organized charts and reference lists for everything from the colors and qualities of common beer styles to the potential sources of off flavors in beers.  Excellent learning and reference book, I suppose we’ll find out how much it helps shortly.