Android Apps

Biermacht

Biermacht is a very useful recipe formulator with calculators to help you create and fine tune your beer recipes. It has many standard ingredients built-in, which also allows you build a recipe from scratch, following a particular beer style.

The way I use it is to look for a recipe for a particular style that interests me (from the web or books) and then modify that to get the SG and colour that I am looking for. As you enter the ingredients, the calculators give you the expected starting SG and colour. What I have found is that these calculators give you a pretty accurate value as to what you are going to get, especially with the SG.

I have written this tutorial as a memory jogger as it is not always clear to the path that needs to be followed when using this app. I will update this tutorial as I find more interesting aspects to comment on. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, the developer's work commitments are keeping him too busy to modify the app, but the source code is available on Github for anyone to modify.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I built a blonde ale, which I called Very Pale Ale.

Formulating a Recipe

When you open the app, you are presented with your recipes on the left and the ingredients for the recipe on the right. To add a recipe, you tap on the + on the top right of the screen. In the screenshot below, I have already added the Very Pale Ale recipe.


Figure 1: The opening screen

On tapping on the +, you get the following screen with some default values for your brew.


Figure 2: The recipe basics

The items can be changed by tapping on them. Changes I usually make are Recipe Name, Beer Style, Recipe Type, Batch Size and Boil Size.

The next step is to add ingredients. Tap on the "Add Ingredient" button as shown in figure 1.


Figure 3: The types of ingredients that can be added

Firstly add the fermentables. As I am doing a partial mash, the starting point would be the extracts.


Figure 4: The types of fermentables

There are many fermentables in the list. You can scroll through the list or search for whatever you are looking for (doesn't work too well). You can also add your own fermentables to the list. Unfortunately, the SA suppliers don't give all the information needed for the app to do its calculations, so I try to find an equivalent already on the list.


Figure 5: Information about the fermentable

After adding a few fermentables, we can start looking as to where we are heading. In the image below, each of the fermentables shows their contribution to the SG.


Figure 6: The recipe with three fermentables added

At this stage, by tapping on "Details" on the bottom of the screen in Figure 6 (or swiping to the left), we can see where our recipe is heading.


Figure 7: The details of the recipe at this stage

According to the specs for the style given on the right, the SG is a bit low at this stage, but the colour is spot on. A bit more fermentables have to be added to get the SG up. I decided to add some pale crystal malt (called Munich Aromatic on the Brewcraft website).


Figure 8: Adjusting the fermentables

The details screen will now show the SG is within spec, but the colour is a bit darker (see fig 11 below).

Next, add the hops. For this brew I chose Northern Brewer and East Kent Goldings. As with the fermentables, there are many choices of hops.


Figure 9: Choosing the hop variety

Finally add the yeast. For this brew I used Safale 04. As with the fermentables and the hops, there are many choices of yeasts.


Figure 10: The final recipe

The details screen now shows what to expect on brew day.


Figure 11: The final details of the recipe before the brew

Adding Details from Brew Day

This took me a while to figure out, but something said to me there must be some way to add items like original and final gravities of the brew otherwise some of the items on the details list are meaningless.

The trick in this case, is to long press on the recipe name on the left. The app's information bar on the top then changes as shown below (compare this image to figure 10).


Figure 12: Biermacht's hidden edit mode

Tapping on the pencil icon brings up the following screen showing which items can be edited.


Figure 13: Biermacht's editable items within a recipe

In figure 13, I have already entered the original gravity of the brew. Entering the final gravity brings up the calculated value for the alcohol content of the brew.

Other Features

There are other features in the app which I have not yet fully explored. One is the settings menu (accessible from the gear icon on the top right of the app screen).


Figure 14: The settings screen

Important to me in this one was to have metric units.

A set of tools can be accessed by tapping on the "hamburger icon" (three horizontal bars) on the top left of the app screen.


Figure 15: The tools menu

As yet I haven't fiddled around too much with these tools.

Conclusion

This app is very useful to any brewer not wishing to pay loads of money for some of the other similar apps out there.

There are a few things I would like to see added to the app, such as end of fermentation date and yeast pitching temperature, but I can get by with it as is.

One thing that I don't like is exporting the recipes to an XML file. I would rather see this in a CSV format.