# 🍺 Top-down Brew: Beer Engine Overview

## General Description

The Beer Engine is free, open-source brewing software for the purpose of recipe creation. Like most brewing software, it calculates the ingredient amounts needed for beer recipes. The big difference from other calculators is the results are percentage-driven rather than weight-driven. The desired percentages are used to calculate the weight needed. The output is one-click. It's much easier to start with percentage targets then get the weights needed rather than hunting around to get the right weights for hitting your target.

This software is released under a Creative Commons license. It is free as in free beer and liberty. No cookies, data collection, or tracking are used. All computations are done on the users computer rather than the cloud.

## Recipes

- Style-based recipes
- Clones and miscellaneous recipes, including original recipes

## Resources, documentation, and more

Learn more about the technology driving the beer engine calculator.

- Rationale: The value of focusing on percentages instead of weights
- Codes: Documentation of the codes needed, with explanations
- Documentation: Technical details about calulations like grain bills and IBUs
- Do it yourself: How to make your own beer engine calculator pages
- Tools: Specialized tools for speeding conversion of standard recipes to the beer engine format
- Improvements: How this version is different from previous beer engine software
- Archive: Old versions of the software for download