Brewing Software on Linux: BeerSmith

I had heard about BeerSmith for a long time. In many ways, it was supposed to replace ProMash as the most popular brewing software out there. I had always wanted to try it, but never did because it was natively written for Windows. As I was doing this series on brewing software, on a whim, I visited the BeerSmith website. What I found out, to my pleasant surprise, is that, like ProMash, it supposedly worked on Linux under Wine, a Windows emulator. I decided to give it a try.

On my Asus EEE PC, running Xandros Linux, I downloaded the BeerSmith 1.4 installer, and ran it in Wine 0.9.25. BeerSmith installed it quite easily. When I ran it for the first time, however, Wine came up with a window saying that it needed to install Wine Gecko, a sort of Internet Explorer replacement. After that, BeerSmith started up.


The first thing that I did, like I had done on previous brewing software evaluations for this series of posts, is try to put together my porter recipe. That is when I noticed the first problem. BeerSmith seemed to have a rather limiting display bug. As I added new ingredients, the only thing that it would display in the ingredient pane was the amount of an ingredient. It would not display the name of the ingredient, type of ingredient, IBU contributions, or percentage of the malt bill. There were columns in the panel like it was supposed to. However, those columns were simply blank. I assumed that this was a defect from running under Wine. This seemed much more serious that ProMash's formating issues under Wine, as information was actually omitted from the screen.


Despite the defect, what BeerSmith did have over its rivals was an impressive list of features. It seems to have screens for everything. There were water profilers, strike temperature calculators, decoction calculators, boil off calculators, hop bitterness calculators, hop aging calculators, hydrometer adjustment calculators, attenuation calculators, carbonation calculators, and more. There were also databases for equipment, yeast, beer styles, ingredient types, mash profiles. You could also make shopping lists, and manage inventories. It was all there, everything you could think of.

What impressed me as well is the relevance of the databases. Unlike all its rivals, it had all the ingredients for my porter recipe, including the odd ones like smoked malt, Glacier hops and the oak chips.


One thing that has plagued all the software evaluations I've done for this series is IBU calculations. Every single piece of brewing software I've used has come up with a different IBU value, even though they have all been set up the use the Rager formula. BeerSmith was no different. For my porter recipe, it seemed to fall between QBrew's 19 and ProMash's 24, with a value of 22.

Another inconsistency I found with BeerSmith is that it gave me a lower OG than the rest. It gave me an OG of 1.053 where all the other brewing software gave me an OG of 1.055. I had to bump up the efficiency to give me an OG of 1.055.

There was another problem, too, though this one was more of an annoyance. Like StrangeBrew, BeerSmith did not seem to handle the EEE PC's odd screen resolution of 1024 x 600 very well. They seemed to cram too much information on the screen, and I had to scroll around a lot. In fact, some screens did not even have scroll bars, seemingly leaving me out to dry, but I found that I could get it to scroll anyway with my mouse wheel.

Summarizing, this is what I found: In fact, BeerSmith did run under Wine, as advertised. However, it had a potential fatal flaw, omitting important information from the recipe screen. Also, the numbers, like IBUs, and OG did not match the other software I evaluated. With that said, though, the ingredient databases were the most complete. Best of all, BeerSmith had the absolute best list of features, even more comprehensive than ProMash, which I kind of use as a benchmark.

That is about it. I hope you found this review useful.