BrewMate

BrewMate is a feature-rich application that provides professional brewers and amateurs with a user-friendly workspace and handy calculators for creating, exporting and publishing beer recipes. It contains predefined recipe lists which can be easily edited.

The installation procedure takes little time and minimal intervention. However, .NET Framework must be installed in order for BrewMate to run. It's wrapped in professional-looking interface that may seem overwhelming at the first run. The tool has a neatly organized structure, though.

New recipes can be put together by specifying a name, style, batch size (L), efficiency (%) and original gravity (OG). The final gravity (FG), bitterness (IBU), BU:GU ratio, balance value, and alcohol level (%) are automatically computed by the app, and you can tweak the values in the meantime.

When it comes to the grain bill, you can choose a fermentable beer form the list to find out the potential extraction and color. Likewise, you can examine and edit hop bill details by picking a hop from the list and entering the alpha, form (e.g. plug, pellet, leaf), grams, grams per liter, use (e.g. mash, first wort, boil, aroma, dry hop), and time. Beer chilling can be enabled or disabled.

In the last part of the main application window, you can pick a miscellaneous bill, type (e.g. fining, flavor, herb, spice, water agent), use (e.g. boil, mash, primary, secondary, bottling), time, and grams. The default mash temperature and length can be modified, in addition to the boil length, ferment temperature, and yeast.

After entering brew day mode, you can review the recipe specifications (batch size, original gravity), mash (e.g. total grain, strike water, total mash volume), sparge (e.g. sparge water and deadspace), total water required, boil details (e.g. wort volume before boil, final volume) as well as actual brewhouse efficiency.

You can add personal notes along with the system date and time, print the recipe, save it to file and resume it later (XML format), publish it on the developer's website, as well as export it to file with the TXT or HTML format. All recipes and settings can be backed up.

BrewMate puts at your disposal timers for the mash and boil, along with a stopwatch for brewing. It also supplies you with calculators for the strike water temperature, refractometer, gravity correction, wort boil off and evaporation rate, water dilution, hydrometer temperature, alcohol, yeast attenuation and calories, along with natural and forced carbonation.

It's possible to edit beer styles, fermentable and miscellaneous beer, hops, and yeast. As far as program settings are concerned, you can change units for measurement and calculations, together with the default options for the recipe and day mode.

The application worked smoothly in our tests, without triggering the operating system to hang, crash or prompt error messages. It had minimal impact on computer performance in our tests, running on low CPU and RAM.

To sum it up, BrewMate facilitates numerous options and configuration settings to help you create and export beer recipes. Plus, it's freeware.