Organise your home beer brewing with BrewTarget

Making good beer at home is a combination of science and art, and BrewTarget is a good program for keeping all your recipes organised.

Installation is easy and there are plenty of presets included in the different sections to get you going.

The first step is to set up your equipment, including the volume and the boil time used. The Notes section includes some helpful notes and reveals that the '5 gal batch – ideal' is designed as a record for a first go and is meant to be edited as you discover how much evaporation takes place.

Once you're in the recipe view, you can name the brew and select the style and equipment.

The next step is to add the different ingredients. These are broken down into fermentables, hops, miscellaneous, yeast and mash. As with the equipment information, these can all be edited to match whatever you want to use. Miscellaneous includes ingredients such as fruit or spices.

As the ingredients are added the information about the recipe such as the character (balanced, cloying, way hoppy, etc) and the colour are updated automatically.

Once all the information about the recipe has been entered, Brewtarget can then create instructions that can be printed. Steps can be moved up and down through the order if you decide you want to do things differently.

As brewing often involves a lot of waiting, Brewtarget also has a three built-in timers that can each be set to a different time and with a different alert noise. Of course, you will need to leave your computer switched on while the timers are running so you don't miss the alerts.

Once the beer has brewed the priming calculator helps get the bottles ready by calculating the required amount of priming based on the amount of beer made, its temperature and a variety of other options.

This download is the Windows version of Brewtarget, you can find the Mac and Linux versions on the Brewtarget download page.

There are tools for backing up the Brewtarget database as well as importing and exporting recipes using the BeerXML standard.

The makers of Brewtarget have created a short Youtube video showing the software in action although there is no sound.