BeerSmith Tutorial P3: Planning Your Brewing Schedule, by: Ben Bakelaar

Today in the third installment of this series, I review how to use BeerSmith to plan your upcoming 2013 brewing schedule, but first I wanted to draw everyone’s attention back to the two BeerSmith tutorials I’ve already written. The first is an introduction to the software, covering which parts of the screen you should focus on and how to enter a simple recipe. The second delves into all of the detailed screens available when designing a recipe. You can view them at the links below. My question is, what else do you guys want to know about BeerSmith? Who is using it and who isn’t? Leave your comments at the bottom of this article!

BeerSmith Tutorial Part 1

http://www.love2brew.com/Articles.asp?ID=374 BeerSmith Tutorial Part 2: Beyond Recipe Design

http://www.love2brew.com/Articles.asp?ID=394

By the way, I am using the latest version of BeerSmith, not only version 2 but the latest update to 2.1. So, if your screen looks differently than what is referenced, that is probably why. To start, let’s launch the software.

The first thing we want to do is create a fresh new folder for 2013.

You will now have a clean folder to work with.

Go ahead and enter your next 1 or 2 brews you are planning. Don’t worry about the recipe or ingredients at this point. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to use it for planning your calendar.

The main thing we are interested in is setting up the calendar date for the brew day. Choose a date using the drop-down on the right of the new recipe screen. In my example, I chose January 21st since I know I am going to brew on MLK Day!

Now you can select “Calendar” from the View menu in the left navigation area.

What you’ll see now is an overview of the entire month.

You should be able to find the newly entered recipe on the calendar.

So your next question is, what controls the timing of primary, secondary, bottling, etc.? That would be the “Fermentation” screen inside the Recipe.

You can select a preset fermentation profile, or design your own.

Double-clicking on one of the preset profiles will select it for that recipe. If you want to view details about the fermentation profiles, you need to navigate to the “Fermentation Profiles” under the Profiles menu in the left navigation bar.

You will see this screen come up, with a list of the available profiles. Selecting any one will show the details in the reading pane beneath.

If you want to create your own profile, you should be able to choose “Add Ferm” from the top ribbon.

Then, the profile window will come up and you can add in your choices for primary time, secondary time, aging, and temperatures.

Once you save your new profile by clicking OK, you can return to the Fermentation tab on your Recipe screen and select the new aging profile.

Choose the drop-down underneath the fermentation chart, and select your newly created profile.

Now, if you return to the calendar, you will note that the dates have changed, in this case the secondary date is now listed 1 week later instead of 3 days later.

The variety of options in BeerSmith can be dizzying! I hope that this guide has helped you understand how you can use BeerSmith to plan out your brewing on a calendar, even if you never use it for recipes. Again, my question is, what else do you guys want to know about BeerSmith? Who is using it and who isn’t? Leave your comments at the bottom of this article!