Brewing Software on Linux: QBrew

Okay, I'm a bit of a geek, not just a beer geek. I've been a computer geek since I was in a kid. For years, I was running Linux at home. Unfortunately, my Linux box died at home about a year and a half ago. From then until now, I've been Linux free, and sort of missed it. To rectify the situation, I just bought a new Asus EEE PC 1000, running Xandros Linux.

This is not a tech blog, so talking about all that I mentioned above is a bit out of place. However, to bring it back home, I'm going to do a series of four posts on running brewing software on Linux.

The first piece of software I will cover is called QBrew. The version I tried was QBrew 0.3.9. QBrew is open source brewing software, released under the BSD license. It is one of the few pieces of brewing software that runs natively on Linux.

Xandros is a Debian derivative, so I was able install the software on my EEE PC using Debian's package manager.

/home/user> apt-get install qbrew

I then started up QBrew and very quickly was able to put together my porter recipe that I posted a few posts back.


QBrew is easy to use. The screen comes up with a recipe formulator that allows you to enter ingredients. Tabs let you enter grains, hops, and miscellaneous ingredients, including yeast, and flavorings, as well as notes about your recipe. As you add ingredients, QBrew calculates IBUs, SRMs, OG, FG, ABV, and ABW, on the fly.

Upon using the thing, there were a couple of peculiarities. First, one thing that was missing from the list of miscellaneous ingredients was oak chips, which was part of my recipe. Fortunately, QBrew has screens for updating their databases of ingredients. It was easy to add it to the miscellaneous tab.

Second, the calculation for IBUs did not match the same calculations I did in ProMash, for the same recipe. I even changed the IBU algorithm from Rager to Tinseth, and it did not make a difference. In fact, it was further off.

Looking further at the program, under the file tab are a few important features: saving, exporting, and printing. Saving your recipe saves it to a proprietary QBrew format, to be opened later. Exporting allows you to export the recipe in several formats, including XML, PDF, and HTML. Printing send a summary of the recipe to the printer.

Finally, there are a series of calculators in addition to the recipe formulator. These include an ABV calculator and hydrometer correction calculator for temperature.

All these features make for a tight package, not nearly as comprehensive as say ProMash, but pretty useful nonetheless. In fact, I may start using it in place of ProMash as my primary recipe formulator.

That is about it for my look at QBrew on Linux. I hope you find it useful.