The following review is by Matthew Arnold, and was written for the September newsletter of Matt's home brew club, The Green Bay Rackers. It appears on the club's site at http://www.rackers.org. Software Review--ProMash Are you a homebrewer? Got a computer? Well, then, you need some brewing software! There are all kinds of programs available out there: Suds, Brewer's Workshop, HBRCP, and the list goes on and on. I've tried them all, and never really found what I was looking for. So when I saw a message on the Internet newsgroup rec.crafts.brewing which said the author of a new brewing program was looking for beta-testers (people to test the software before its release), I jumped at the chance. The author is Jeffrey Donovan. The product is ProMash. ProMash allows you to create, save, edit, and print both recipes and brewing sessions. Every part of this program is customizable. You can edit the AHA guidelines (when they finally recognize Sticke Altbier as a subcategory), grain list, hops list, etc. You can choose any of the popular hop IBU formulae, and there are even three different formulae to determine final beer color! If you don't like the way ProMash has something set up, chances are you can change it. The recipe designer allows you to create extract, partial mash, or all-grain brews. You can choose any of the latest AHA style categories. ProMash comes with a wide variety of grains, extracts, hops, and yeast already included. If it doesn't have it, you can add it! The brewing session takes the information from your recipe and can keep track of the beer from the beginning of the mash through consumption. Both the recipes and brewing sessions have plenty of room for additional notes. There are also ten stand-alone calculators: unit conversion, hop time (hop degradation given a certain amount of time and storage conditions), hop IBUs, water profiler, water needed (to end up with the right amount of wort in the primary), strike temperature, mash designer, CO2, hydrometer adjustment, and alcohol percentage. All of them are easily accessible from ProMash's well-designed main screen. While flexibility and options are ProMash's greatest strengths, they are also its greatest weakness. New brewers (or new computer users) might be a little overwhelmed by all the options at first. The nice thing is that you don't have to use all the features to use ProMash. Once you've toyed with it for a little bit, you'll get the hang of it. Overall, I'm very impressed with ProMash. It does everything that anyone would want brewing software to do (and then some). Best of all, it's reasonably priced at $24.95. The author is very responsive to users' input. Many of my suggestions made it into the final product. It would definitely be worth your time to point your favorite web browser at http://www.promash.com and download the demo version. The demo gives you access to all ProMash's features, but you are limited to saving three recipes. Pros: "Swiss army knife" of brewing software: it does it all, very configurable, well thought-out and designed. Cons: Can be a little complex for new users. Overall: ***** (five out of five stars) Requirements: Windows 95/98 or Windows NT, approximately seven megabytes of hard drive space plus extra space for recipes (~30K each) and brewing sessions (~50K each). In case anyone might misunderstand, I have no financial interest in ProMash or the Sausalito Brewing Company. I did, however, receive a free copy of the software for being a beta tester. If you have any questions about ProMash, go to their website, or send me email at revmra@iname.com.