Most brewing software makes you learn the software before you can design a beer. Beer Builder asks you to describe the beer.

That is the whole point of it. We wanted something intuitive and fast, not over-engineered, not a spreadsheet with a login, and not a wall of fields you have to understand before you get your first recipe. You say what you want in plain language and it builds it with you.

Underneath that simple surface is a deterministic calculator doing real brewing math. Every gravity, bitterness, color and attenuation figure is computed by an engine, not guessed at by a chatbot, and the same recipe returns the same numbers every single time. Simple to drive, serious underneath. That combination is the reason the tool exists.

We make brewing equipment, not software. We built our own recipe tool for a narrow reason: we wanted a brewer to describe a beer, get a recipe that actually computes, and put the exact grain and hops in a cart without retyping anything. Here is how it stacks up against the two tools most homebrewers already have.

What each one is for

BeerSmith has been around more than twenty years. It is a desktop program for Mac, Windows and Linux, with a web version and mobile apps included on the higher license tiers, and it handles beer, mead, wine and cider. BeerSmith 4 lets you keep your data locally or in the cloud. It has deep inventory, shopping and add-on systems, and it is a paid license.

Brewfather is a subscription web and mobile app built around the whole batch lifecycle. Design a recipe, brew it, track fermentation live from a connected hydrometer, repeat. The free tier covers 25 recipes and 25 batches. Premium is about $29.99 a year for unlimited recipes and batches, and Premium Plus about $49.99 a year, which adds their AI assistant with a monthly credit allowance.

Beer Builder is free, runs in a browser with nothing to install, and you can start without an account. You tell it what you want in plain language and it designs the beer with you. Sign in with a Clawhammer account and the daily limits come off, still at no cost.

Same math, different interface

Start with what is not different. All three tools run the same accepted brewing math. Tinseth for bitterness, Morey for color, gravity and attenuation the way every brewer learned them. Dry hop contact time does not raise IBU in our engine because isomerization needs heat, and Brewfather and BeerSmith treat it the same way. If you move a recipe between the three you should land in the same neighborhood, and when you do not, one of us has a bug.

What differs is how you drive it, and one structural choice underneath.

The structural choice is which part of the system is allowed to produce a number.

In Beer Builder the AI never states a brewing figure. It proposes ingredients by name and amount, nothing else. It cannot emit points per pound per gallon, degrees Lovibond, alpha acid or attenuation. Every one of those constants gets looked up from our ingredient database, and a deterministic engine computes OG, FG, ABV, IBU, SRM and BU:GU from there. Run the same recipe twice and the numbers are identical, because no language model is anywhere near the arithmetic.

That sounds pedantic until you have watched a chatbot report an IBU it made up. Our rule is that nothing shows in the benchmark panel that the calculator did not compute. We keep about 1,135 automated tests on the engine, including a regression suite that locks known-good numbers so an engine change cannot quietly move your recipe out from under you.

The same idea runs through how we model grain. A malt's behavior in the mash comes from a class assigned to each entry from its color and diastatic power: base, kilned, crystal, dextrin, roast or raw. The engine never looks at an ingredient's name to decide how it behaves. Name matching is how Special B gets modeled as a base malt and Carafa III as crystal, and those mistakes do not announce themselves. They just make your predicted gravity wrong.

Designing a beer

Pick a style and an equipment profile, then describe what you want. All 110 styles from the 2021 BJCP guidelines are loaded and used as guidance rather than a fence. If a metric lands outside the range the panel says so and offers to pull it back in, but it will never refuse to build what you asked for. Ask for something deliberately off style and you get it, with a line telling you which ingredients are not characteristic, which is more useful than an argument.

There are 67 equipment profiles to choose from, with our four brew systems pinned at the top, and you can build your own with boil-off rate, grain absorption, losses, efficiency and kettle geometry. Efficiency sits in the header so you can match your own numbers. Batch size, boil length and mash temperature are all editable in the panel, and changing batch size rescales grain, hops, flavorings and salts together rather than leaving you to redo the math.

Every style gets Beer Traits sliders, not just the hazy ones. Hazy IPA additionally gets seven dedicated hop controls for intensity, bitterness, emphasis, dry hop schedule, strength and finish. None of these are AI. They call a deterministic endpoint, transform the recipe and re-run the normal engine, and a reset button puts back exactly the recipe you had before you started dragging.

Ingredients, and where they come from

All Ingredients mode runs over 1,936 entries, which is 938 fermentables, 434 hops and 564 yeasts, for pure calculation with no prices and no cart. In Stock mode uses only what we carry, currently 63 fermentables, 41 hops, 22 yeasts, 7 flavorings and 9 salts, and builds a cart from it. Converting between the two uses an identity matcher that pins each substitution permanently, so a recipe keeps resolving the same way every time you open it.

In stock mode never silently resolves to something we cannot ship. If an item is out, you get a named stand-in and a warning saying what changed. Malt selection follows a maltster preference order per origin, so a German pilsner recipe reaches for German malt first, and a maltster you name always wins.

My Ingredients lets you add your own grain, hops or yeast with your own specs, and they merge ahead of the catalog for your account only. Hops take a custom alpha acid if your lot differs from the book value, and the panel breaks out IBU contribution per addition so you can see which charge is doing the work.

Yeast gets checked against the beer rather than just listed. The engine works out the attenuation band the recipe needs and the maximum starting gravity each strain can finish, so you do not get handed a 73 percent strain for a beer that needs to dry out further than that. And when an ingredient only resolves to estimated specs rather than a real published sheet, it says estimated instead of quietly pretending.

If you already have something in the cupboard, mark it as your own supply. It stays in the calculation and drops out of the cart.

Water, mash and the brew day

The water panel solves rather than just stores. It computes the ion table, alkalinity, residual alkalinity, hardness, the sulfate to chloride ratio and estimated mash pH. It will solve a salt addition toward a target profile, dose acid for you, and flag anything that pushes an ion past normal brewing ranges. It warns rather than blocks, so you can still enter what you want.

Fourteen agents are in the editor, from gypsum and calcium chloride through to lactic, phosphoric and Whirlfloc, and eight of them are stocked and go in the cart with the rest of the recipe. All 110 styles map to one of sixteen water targets with their own mash pH range, and there are twenty classic brewing city profiles if you would rather chase Burton or Pilsen. Enter your own source water once and it attaches to new recipes, or save several under My Water. Salts read out in grams or teaspoons, and change the batch size and the doses scale with it.

Step mash programs ship for 34 styles with every rest editable, and they export as proper BeerXML mash steps so a controller can read them. Strike temperature comes from a mass-based energy balance instead of a rule of thumb. Hop absorption is paid for in the strike water, so your packaged volume actually matches your batch size.

Hops are modeled in the form you really have. Pellet, whole dried, fresh wet and concentrated lupulin products all behave differently, bitterness is computed on dry matter, and wet hop absorption is set at three times the pellet charge it replaces. Per-hop timing covers boil minutes, whirlpool temperature and hold, and dry hop days and stage.

When the recipe is done there is a brew day steps sheet with the actual volumes and temperatures for your rig, and a shopping list. The sheet invents nothing. Where the engine does not model something, it says so rather than filling in a plausible number. And the assistant will never tell you to rack to secondary, because we do not brew that way.

Getting in, and getting out

Brewfather exports, BeerXML files, PDFs and photos of a recipe sheet all import, with an AI pass that settles ingredient identity once and then pins it. There is no direct BeerSmith importer, but BeerSmith exports BeerXML and that comes straight in. You can also photograph a commercial beer and have it researched and cloned as a starting point.

On the way out, recipes download as BeerXML and open in anything. Share links let someone else open your recipe in their own session without touching yours. And if something looks wrong there is a Report a problem page that goes straight to us, which is how a fair number of the things above got built.

Then it ends in a cart

This is the part no general-purpose brewing app can copy, because BeerSmith and Brewfather do not sell ingredients. One click turns a finished recipe into a cart of the actual grain and hops, covered with real package sizes, and recipes are formulated on a four ounce grain grid in stock mode for exactly that reason. Add to cart again after a tweak and it replaces that recipe's lines instead of stacking a second copy. You pick milled or unmilled per grain, and corn and flaked grains are never milled, because milling them does nothing useful.

Saved recipes, saved equipment profiles and My Ingredients all live in your account. Recipes can be renamed, and they reopen in the catalog mode they were built in.

It also talks to the kettle. Pair a Clawhammer controller once with a QR code and your saved recipes show up on it, brews write back to your account as history, and the QR at the end of the brew opens a report plus a reorder link that repeats your original milling. You can log a brew by hand too, and enter your measured OG and FG to see them beside the predicted numbers. To be fair about it, the controller is not locked to us: it also takes Brewfather recipes and BeerXML uploads, so BeerSmith users are not shut out.

What it does not do

Fermentation temperature is an input we store and pass through to BeerXML, but we do not model its effect on attenuation, and we would rather say that than pretend. Mash time is not modeled either, though mash temperature is. There is no live fermentation tracking, no native mobile app and no offline mode. It designs beer, so there is no mead, wine or cider recipe support, and there is no full inventory system.

Where BeerSmith is still the better tool

If you brew mead, wine or cider as well as beer, BeerSmith covers them and we do not. If you want your data on your own hard drive instead of someone else's server, BeerSmith 4 gives you that choice. And if you want serious inventory management plus twenty years of tutorials, forum threads and podcast archives to dig through when you get stuck, that depth is real and we are nowhere near it.

Where Brewfather is still the better tool

Brewfather is a batch tracking app that also designs recipes. We are a recipe tool that also logs brews. If you want live fermentation readings from a floating hydrometer, a full batch history with notes and measurements, native iOS and Android apps that work offline, and a big shared community recipe library, Brewfather does all of that and we do not. Their Premium Plus tier includes an AI assistant too, so AI recipe help is not something only we have. What differs is the architecture underneath it.

Who should use what

If you want one app to run your whole brewing life, track every batch and watch fermentation in real time, pay for Brewfather. If you want an offline desktop program that covers every fermented drink and you like owning your own data, buy BeerSmith.

If you want to describe a beer, get numbers that were computed instead of guessed, adjust it with controls that are not guessing either, and have the ingredients in a cart two minutes later, use Beer Builder. It is free, there is nothing to install, and if you decide later it is not for you, your recipes export as BeerXML and go wherever you want.

Try Beer Builder free. No account needed to start.

A note on the comparison: Brewfather pricing comes from their published pricing page in October 2026 and varies by region. BeerSmith licensing is tiered and we have not quoted a figure, so check their store for current pricing. The Beer Builder counts come from our live catalog and engine.