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Brewing Beer With Free Software
An anonymous reader tipped us to an interview with Phillip Lee, author of Brewtarget, one of the best pieces of Free brewing software available (it's even in Debian). The interview discusses some of the technical decisions made (why Qt and Cmake?), and mentions a bit of the plans for future development: "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." (The last bit about water salt modifications comes as a relief to at least this brewer.)
Anyone interested should google Greg Lehey. He was the guy that practically coined the phrase, "Free as in Beer." He has been using FreeBSD to assist in beer brewing for many years!
Sorry to say but that's just not correct. You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected, and to do so, you need to look at how much water you are boiling off over a period of time. There are a lot of other factors with regard to this as well. Your altitude will cause you to have differing levels of boil off as well. Ever seen a recipe with high altitude variations for preparation? It's the same principle. If you want five gallons of beer, you need to know about how much water you will loose per hour at a given boil rate. This goes for both all grain and extract methods. All grain makes it even more important to know about water consuption for reasons not to do with boil off.