BrewSublime is a modern, web-based take on homebrewing software that allows you to create, edit, and share your recipes with other brewers online. Let's walk through the steps of signing up and creating our first recipe. Please note that all screenshots are current as of when this document was written, but BrewSublime is currently in beta and some things may look different if you are reading this in the future!
You can sign up for BrewSublime on the front page or find the Sign Up link in the Menu on the left side of your browser window. On smaller screens, the Menu may not be visible until you click the MENU button in the top-left corner of your browser.
Sign Up form on the front page
Once you've entered a valid email, username, and password you should receive a notification in the top-right of your browser window.
You should receive this notification after signing up. Check your email and click the link to confirm that you own this email address.
You should receive an email within a couple of minutes of signing up. This email contains a link designed to prove that the person who signed up owns the email account. Once you click this link you should be good to go.
The email you get may look different, but it will come from the BrewSublime admin account.
Once your email address is confirmed you can sign up with the email address and password you set earlier.
Congrats! Your email address has been confirmed and you may now log into BrewSublime with the email and password you used at signup.
Logging in will immediately redirect you to the BrewSublime app. The first screen is your "Dashboard". You can use this page to find recipes created by you or by other brewers. Feel free to browse through the recipes shown by clicking the button that says "Peek", with a little eyeball. You have the option of "Cloning" the recipes into your own library if you'd like to play around with editing an existing recipe.
Your "dashboard" when you log in, showing other user's published recipes. You can click the button under "My Recipes" to only show recipes you created.
You can always return to this page by finding the entry for "Dashboard", with an icon of a house, on the sidebar menu.
On the left is the main sidebar menu for BrewSublime. On large screens, it will always be open. On smaller screens, you may have to click the MENU button in the top-right to show it.
Before creating our own recipes let's set our preferred measurement units. We can do this through the "Settings" entry in the sidebar menu. BrewSublime attempts to auto-detect your time zone, but if it isn't correct you can override that here.
Choose your preferred measurement units for weights, liquid volumes, temperatures, and gravity readings.
After selecting our preferred measurement units, let's set some profile info. Find the menu entry with your username (@brewsublime in this case). It should have a picture next to it, that is the default avatar. Your profile page allows you to write a blurb telling other brewers about yourself, select an avatar image to represent yourself, and edit your subscription. At the time of this writing, BrewSublime is in Beta so you can safely ignore the Subscription section until that changes.
Set some profile text to let other brewers know a bit about you.
In the "Set Avatar" section, you can either select a stock avatar image or upload a custom one. Here, I've uploaded a custom avatar.
Upload a custom avatar (top) or select from one of the BrewSublime stock avatars (below).
One last thing before we create our first Recipe: We need to let BrewSublime know a few things about how we brew. We do this by creating Breweries. When you sign up, a default brewery is automatically created for you; however, this is unlikely to reflect how you actually brew! Find the "Manage Breweries" button on the sidebar menu. Clicking that will allow you to either edit the default brewery or create one or more different brewery profiles.
The "Manage Breweries" page. Here we only have one brewery, you can use the "New" button in the top right to create as many as you need.
The "Active Brewery" is an important concept to understand before you begin creating recipes. If you edited the existing brewery, it is already set to the "Active Brewery" because there are no others to choose from. If you created a new one, you need to click "Set Active Brewery". BrewSublime automatically adjusts the amount of grains, sugars, and hops needed to reach a recipe's target gravity and IBUs to match your brewery settings. This helps take some of the thinking out of adapting another user's recipe for your system, or from scaling up recipes from a stove top to something larger.
"BrewSublime 10 Gallon" brewery is the active brewery. Click one of the other breweries to activate a different one. If your Recipe Editor is open, amounts will change to hit the same target gravity and IBUs on the new active brewery.
Your active brewery is highlighted in gold on the sidebar menu. If you have more than one, you can click one of the other breweries to immediately set that one as the Active Brewery. If the recipe editor is open, you may notice the amounts change a bit. This is by design, as you may need more or fewer grains to hit the same Original Gravity, more or fewer hops to hit the same IBUs, and so on.
With our Active Brewery set we are finally ready to create our first recipe! Find the "Create New Recipe" button in the sidebar menu and give it a click.
Creating a new recipe.
Batch size and boil length will be set for you based on your Active Brewery profile. You can override those defaults for any recipe if you need to. All we need to fill out is the Recipe Name, and optionally select a BJCP Style. Let's go with an Imperial Stout.
Browsing through BJCP styles - click "Set Style" when you find the right match.
Clicking the button labeled "Beer Style (None Selected)" launches a Beer Style Guide browser. You can read through the different entries until you find one that's a match. To set the style for this beer, click the big green "Set Style" button. You can always change the style later in the recipe editor if something changes down the road.
Once we click "Set Style" and then "Create BrewSublime Imperial Stout", we're launched into the recipe editor and greeted with... not much!
The (blank) Recipe Editor.
I think this recipe would churn out a fine batch of water but we're looking to make some beer. Let's start by creating a mash profile. You can add as many mash steps as you need but we're going to keep it simple with a single infusion mash of 154°F for 1 hour. Let's click the "Add New Mash Step" button under the Mash section. Before you add any mash steps, this button will have a blinking yellow light to help you find it.
Adding a mash step.
Fill out the temperature and minutes fields then click "Add New Mash Step". Your first and only mash step should now show up in the recipe editor.
After clicking the green add button, the Recipe Editor should show your new mash step.
Now it's time to add some grains we can convert into sugars. Each stage of brewing has an "Add Ingredient" button. Clicking that button under the mash section launches an ingredient selector. For the mash stage, this defaults to showing Grains and Sugars. You can also search for Additives or Hops by clicking the appropriate tab.
Searching through Grains / Sugars to add to our Mash. To search Hops or Additives, click the appropriate tab near the top.
The ingredient selector for grains and sugars allows you to search by name and filter by manufacturer, color range, base malts, specialty malts, and so on. You can sort the results by name or by color. For our primary base malt, let's type "maris otter" in the name field, and sort by darkest to lightest. Let's go with Thomas Fawcett's Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt at 2.7°.
Filtering grains with the word "munich" in the name, sorted by lightest to darkest color malts.
You can select multiple ingredients at a time. Each selection will add a form below the ingredient selector where you can specify the amount to add. You may need to click the "Reset" button to quickly clear the filters you set earlier. Let's search for "munich" in the name field, limit results to products from Bestmalz, and sort from lightest to darkest. Let's throw in some Bestmalz Munich Dark to go with our Maris Otter base.
With those two ingredients selected, now we just have to fill in the forms below the ingredient selector with the appropriate amounts. Other ingredients, hops in particular, may have more fields to fill out.
Adding Munich Dark to our Mash. You can add either by gravity contribution or by weight.
We can add by weight or by gravity contribution. Here I've added 1.060 worth of Thomas Fawcett Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt and 1.015 worth of Bestmalz Munich Dark. Note that as you type in one field, the other automatically updates. With my brewery settings, it takes 22.52 lbs of Maris Otter to hit 1.060 gravity, and 5.63 lbs of Munich Dark to add 1.015. If your brewery settings are different than mine, the amounts may be different - that's okay! Once you have the right amount set, click the "To Mash" button with a plus sign to actually add it to your mash tun.
I'm also going to add a bit of Crystal Malt and the Black Malt that turns this into an actual Stout. To close the ingredient selector, just click the "Add Ingredient" button again - it should be highlighted in yellow when active, making it easy to find. Ultimately, we have this fairly complex grain bill:
Mash Editor with five different grains.
Note that each ingredient has its own toolbar. There are buttons to delete or remove the ingredient from the recipe, a pencil button which lets you substitute a different ingredient, and a circular letter i which shows more info about that specific ingredient. The toolbar color reflects the lovibond color value of each ingredient.
At the top of our recipe we can find some statistics which allow us to get a feel for where we are so far. The BJCP Style Guidelines for Imperial Stout recommend the color of the beer reach at least 30 SRM, and ours is at 45.8 which is acceptable for an Imperial Stout. At this stage, some of the other values are still a bit off. There are no IBUs since we haven't boiled any hops, and the FG / ABV are a guess-timation since we haven't added any Yeast yet.
Aside from IBUs, we're in the general ballpark according to the BJCP Style Guidelines.
Let's jump into the kettle section. Note that the toolbar for the kettle has an additional icon. The clock allows you to change the length of your boil. If you shorten your boil - for example, going from 60 to 45 minutes - any ingredients that were set to boil for longer than 45 minutes will be automatically adjusted for you. Hop amounts will be changed to reach the same IBUs they contributed under the longer boil.
Let's add some hops! We just need to find the same "Add Ingredient" button in the Kettle section that we clicked under our Mash section. At this stage of brewing, it opens hops by default, but you can always change to the additives or sugars tabs (BrewSublime does not support adding Grains to the boil).
Let's use Columbus hops for bittering and pay homage to Rogue's Shakespeare Stout by finishing off with a bunch of Cascade at flameout. Notice that each form has more fields than our grains from before - that's because hop additions can be a bit more complex.
Adding Columbus as a First Wort Hop to bitter, then finishing with a quarter pound of Cascade.
For method, we're going to use First Wort for the Columbus and Boil for the Cascade. You can also select Steep or Hopback, if you utilize either of those methods. Setting the boil time to 0 for Cascade makes it a flameout hop. Similar to how we added our grains by gravity contribution, we can also add hops by IBU contribution. Note that IBU contribution will change if you update the grain bill, because the original gravity of the beer makes a difference in IBU contribution.
Let's throw in 80 IBUs of Columbus and polish things off with a quarter pound of Cascade pellets at flameout.
Two hop additions in the boil. You can also add Steep / Whirlpool hops or Hopback additions at this stage.
If needed, you can find ingredients like "Irish Moss" under the Additives tab. But we're going to keep things simple. No one cares if our Imperial Stout is a little hazy, after all.
With our hops in the kettle let's move on to the last stage of brewing, fermentation. Note the empty "Target FG" field. The only way to determine final gravity with certainty is by brewing and fermenting the beer, but we can set a reasonable goal here. Let's go with 1.018.
Setting our target final gravity.
Notice there is an "Estimated" ABV and a "Target" ABV: the estimate is calculated using attenuation numbers from the yeast manufacturer, while the target is set by you. We have no estimate because we haven't quite gotten around to adding yeast yet. The attenuation numbers from yeast companies aren't exactly 100% accurate but can help show you a reasonable target to aim for. Once we add yeast, the Est ABV field should be filled in, but don't worry too much about it unless it's way off from the target you've set.
Speaking of yeast, let's pay more respect to Rogue's Shakespeare Stout by selecting Imperial Yeast's "A18 Joystick" strain, which is thought to be similar to Rogue's "PacMan" house yeast.
We're going to call for 4 packs of Yeast. We can also specify the quantity in Quarts of slurry or target cell count in the billions. It's always best practice to create a yeast starter, especially with a beer this big. You can remind other brewers of this in the Recipe Notes, which you can find at the very top of the recipe editor above the Mash stage.
Adding Imperial Yeast A18 Joystick to the fermentor.
Now that we have some yeast, our fermentation profile is complete.
Our brief but complete fermentation section. You can add dry hops / keg hops here, as well as sugars and additives if necessary.
If we wanted to go crazy we could also add some dry hops or keg hops, or throw in some simple sugars, any ingredient type we needed. But we're going to keep this example recipe fairly simple, so let's call this fermentation profile good.
At the top of the recipe editor you will find a notes option, as well as a button that allows you to upload an image for your recipe. If you don't have an image, it will default to your current avatar. Let's recommend a yeast starter and pick a goofy AI generated image. Our stats are all within the appropriate range for an Imperial Stout, so it looks like we're done creating our first recipe!
Our completed recipe.
With our recipe finished, now's a good time to take a look at some other buttons. The very top of the recipe editor page has several worth knowing about.
On the far left is the menu, the center is the name of our recipe, and then there are four buttons on the right: you can star the recipe, "clone" it into a new recipe, share it, or use the settings button at the end to rename or delete it.
Let's look at those buttons in the top right of the recipe editor from left to right.
First you have the "star" button. This works similar to the "like" buttons you find on social media. You can star your own recipes and you can star other user's recipes. Recipes with more stars will show up first when sorted by popularity.
The next button allows you to "clone" a recipe. This lets you bring other user's recipes into your library to be edited, or allows you to create a newer version of an existing recipe of your own.
The third button is the most important. This allows you to share your recipe in various ways. You can download it as a plain text file suitable for posting on other brewing forums or just to save on your own computer, or you can "Publish" your recipe, which allows other user's to find it and gives you a link that even people who aren't signed up with BrewSublime can view.
The Share Recipe dialog. Publishing your recipe will give you a link to share with others, but you can also download it as a plain text file to be saved on your computer or posted on other forums.
The last button, a settings icon, contains options that may be risky to apply. You can rename your recipe, but if it is published that may invalidate existing links. You can also delete your recipe if you aren't happy with it.
As for sharing a link to the recipe, this is what our creation looks like to someone who hasn't signed up for BrewSublime:
Your recipe as viewed by someone without a BrewSublime account.
If you download the text file, it will look like this:
Plain text download of our Recipe.
You can scale your recipe up or down by clicking the batch size near the top right of your recipe editor. You can substitute or delete ingredients using the pencil icon or trash icon on on a given ingredient's toolbar, or read more info about the ingredient by clicking the circular letter i icon. Feel free to poke around, it doesn't hurt to go exploring!
Thank you for trying out BrewSublime. If you have any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to use the contact form or email [email protected] - feedback is very helpful during this beta stage, as it's the best way to help me figure out what new features to add. Coming soon: exporting to PDF, better printing of recipes, and hop extracts.
