- May 03, 2018 Brew Town on PC (Windows / MAC) Download and install BlueStacks or Remix OS Player. Open the installed BlueStacks or Remix OS Player and open the Google Play Store in it. Now search for “Brew Town” using the Play Store. Install the game and open the app drawer or all apps in the emulator.
- Mar 18, 2013 I just purchased BeerSmith last week and during this weekends brewing fiasco I noticed a difference between the way BeerSmith and BrewersFriend do calculations. I have a quick question about this in Beer Smith, if you know. My experience with it – before switching to BeerAlchemy (Mac OS X here) – was that my numbers came out all.
- Mar 13, 2019 BeerSmith 3.0.8 - Brewing application featuring a variety of helpful resources. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate.
- Apr 11, 2017 Introduction One of the key aspects of homebrew is recipe formulation and management. Creating a tasty brew that meets the characteristics of its target style is no easy task, involving many calculations and variables (color, bitterness, specific gravity, etc). So it's not surprising that there are several homebrew software programs such as QBrew, CyberBrau, DrewBrew, ProMash, Strangebrew.
If you’ve always wanted to brew your own beer, you’ll be glad to know there’s an app for that. Created by Philip Lee, Brewtarget is an open source application that helps home brewers create and manage beer recipes. We talk to Lee about Brewtarget’s history, its features, and its future.
Mar 12, 2018 This is a pretty credible piece of brewing software, although it really could use a little work on the usability front. Its real strengths over other Brewing Apps, for the Mac, is its ability to import recipes into a database, suggest recipes from ingredients if you have a recipe, export to a web page, and send to your iPod if you want to brew with your iPod.
Since my college days at the University of Texas, I’ve wanted to start home brewing my own beer. One of my college roommates dabbled in home brewing for a while, and now I’m friends with several members of the Lawrence Brewer’s Guild. Maybe by the time my daughter goes to college, I will have hopped into home brewing, and when I do, I’ll have a free, open source program to help me master my mixes of fermentables.
Philip Lee is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science doctoral candidate who brews his own beer. In fact, he put his computer science chops to use in his home brews by developing Brewtarget, a free, open source application that helps brewers create and manage beer recipes. In this interview, Lee explains what happens when you mix open source programming with a passion for brewing beer.
Linux.com: What inspired you to write Brewtarget?
Philip Lee: Right after I got into homebrewing in 2008, I was looking for open source beer tools for Linux, and I found QBrew, but after looking at its implementation and contemplating whether to extend it or start from scratch, I decided I could do better by starting from scratch. I made some simple attempts early in 2008, but didn’t get very far, and resorted to calculating recipes by hand. I’m actually glad I did this, because after doing this for about a year, I learned all the math I would need to make a piece of software, plus some extra. The serious work started in December 2008, when I was sitting at home over the holidays – I was, and still am, a grad student – and had some free time to kill.
Linux.com: Which Linux and open source tools did you use to create Brewtarget?
Philip Lee: At the time, I had a Sony Vaio laptop loaded with Debian “Sarge” and KDE. After writing most of the underlying code in C++, I was starting to look for GUI libraries. I had never really used any GUI library in C++ before, so I tried out a number of them like GTK, FLTK, and finally Qt. I ended up with Qt, because out of all of them, it was by far the best documented and had the best tools as far as I could tell.
What I really love about Qt itself is its “meta object” system. It effectively extends C++ to include class property information that you can retrieve at run-time, like an object’s class name, what it inherits, accessor functions and so on, much like more modern languages. This allows you to do stuff like set an object’s properties and fields by name, rather than having to know the actual accessor function at compile time. Qt also has meta functions as well, which is really nice as Brewtarget becomes more complex and abstract, allowing us to execute a generic function on a generic object without having to write object-specific code.
Qt Designer is a great little drag-n-drop graphical layout tool that we use heavily to design most of our widgets and windows. It also allows you to connect GUI events, modify the basic properties, and so on in order to keep the codebase shorter and cleaner.
One of Qt’s other tools I like a lot is Qt Linguist for translation and localization. Basically, when you wrap a string literal in the code with tr() , Qt will automatically keep a list of those translatable strings and let you export them for giving to a translator. Linguist makes it pretty simple for the translator, even if s/he doesn’t know anything about coding, to open those files and send us back all the translations. I’m positive that the translations we get are really what sets Brewtarget apart from other beer software. Beer is international.
CMake is by far my favorite tool that we use, though. I have to say, qmake, which is Qt’s default project build tool, is really quite painful to work with, but I didn’t know any better for a while; however, after asking one too many questions on the KDE IRC channels, someone told me to just switch to CMake, since that’s what they use instead of qmake. Life has never been the same. Other than the fact that you can make UNIX makefiles, Visual Studio projects, and other toolchain-specific build files without any effort, it allows you to even package the output up into an NSIS installer for Windows, or a Debian or Red Hat package, or a Mac disk image, or whatever with the CPack module. Coupled with the fact that it has built-in robust tools for finding all the Qt libraries on your system, it becomes a real trifecta of a build tool.
Linux.com: I see that Brewtarget is still actively developed. Who helps you with it?
Philip Lee: We have quite a few contributors. Most of them just come to fix a particular bug or implement a specific feature and then go on to other projects. I would consider my good buddy Mik to be the “second in command,” so to speak. He is a long-term developer who always helps me out when he has time. He’s really good to bounce ideas off of, and is the one who suggested that we move off of our old in-memory database to SQLite, and we are working on finalizing that transition now for the next release.
Linux.com: Do you have any idea how many people actually use Brewtarget?
Philip Lee: I only have a vague guess at the number of users. We have about 51k downloads from the SourceForge site, and get about 60 new downloads per day, but now as the package is accepted into Debian, that won’t be an accurate number going forward.
Linux.com: If I’m interested in starting to brew my own beer at home, what will I need to know before I start using Brewtarget?
Philip Lee: First that it’s very rewarding. It’s very much like going from eating fast food to cooking better, tastier meals at home. It’s a hobby that can be a simple or complex as you want really. My favorite introduction is a book by John Palmer, available for free, at howtobrew.com. The basic things that matter in a beer are how much sugar is in it before and after fermentation — determines the sweetness and amount of alcohol; how bitter it is, to balance the sweetness; and what color it is. These are things that you can calculate from Palmer’s book, but that Brewtarget will do automatically for you.
Linux.com: What’s next for Brewtarget?
Philip Lee: This next release is mostly an internal clean up. The way the database was designed previously really hadn’t been changed since the my first code in 2008, and we were running into a brick wall with some of the features we wanted. After we move to SQLite, there will be quite a lot of new features like being able to search through the ingredients in the database and stuff like that. I also plan to add some water chemistry tools for people that like to alter the ions and salts to fit a particular profile.
Linux.com: Anything else you’d like to add?
Philip Lee: Maybe I’ll take this time to answer typical first questions about home brewing. Will I get Jake leg from it? No way. Can you make Bud? Yes, but why would you want to when you can make a vanilla cream ale, or a black IPA, or a cranberry wheat ale? Is it cheap? It typically costs about 60 cents for a bottle. How long does it take? About a month to go from grain to glass. Does it taste good? Extremely. Where can I ask questions? homebrewtalk.com. Where can I get supplies? midwestsupplies.com.
Beer and coding. Love it.
Linux.com: Thanks to Philip for taking time out of his busy brewing schedule for this interview.
Brewtarget is available for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and some other UNIX-like platforms. See a video demo of Brewtarget in action on the project’s SourceForge page.
Best Beer Brewing App
The easiest way to install a number of Unix style applications and open source software onto macOS Catalina, Mojave and earlier Sierra OS versions is via a package manager, unfortunately, macOS Catalina doesn’t come with one, but fortunately, some good folks care, they come in the form of Homebrew.
The install of Homebrew also works on macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, (High)Sierra, El Capitan, and Yosemite, so macOS 10.10 – 10.14
Homebrew isn’t the only option, also available is MacPorts and Fink but Homebrew is the newest and most popular of the trio.
Install Homebrew
To download install Homebrew run the install script on the command line as below and let the script do its thing:
If you don’t have Apples Xcode Command Line Tools installed it will prompt you to install to carry on with the Homebrew installation and download the Command Line Tools.
Then Homebrew is installed.
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After this Homebrew is installed and ready to install other apps.
To get started run brew help can give some command example usage.
To check for any issues with the Homebrew install run:
One issue that typically comes up is an outdated or missing version of Xcode.
For the latest Catalina, brew doctor will warn that the Homebrew install won’t be 100% if Xcode is not up to date, so update Xcode from the App Store.
To search for an application:
To install
To list all apps installed by Homebrew
To remove an installed application
To update Homebrew itself
To see what packages are out of date but not to upgrade them
To see what upgrade packages all or singular
To hold a package at a certain version
To release a package from a certain version
To see what else you can do
Where does Homebrew install stuff …. in the Cellar
Where the brew lives.
You can see your Homebrew configuration by running
The output should be similar to …
All installations via Homebrew are filed independently in the filing system in /usr/local/Cellar and linked into /usr/local/bin which is a directory which allows you to run these commands and apps as if part of the regular operating system.
This directory is also out of the SIP bounds so there should be no authentication macOS error dialog boxes.
Remove Home-brew and all packages
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To remove the Home-brew installation and all packages it has installed..
Best Beer Brewing App For Mac Os X
HomeBrew is a great package manager just start installing some apps and explore.!