Brewing Software Review: BrewTimer for iPhone

Available at the App Store for $1.99
Overall Grade B+

Updated Review for v1.1
BrewTimer is a simple little app that lets you set up named alarms for the specific "Steps" for brewing a beer. Start by creating a new Timer for your beer recipe, save it, and then select your new Timer from the list so you can add alarm times for the individual Steps. Enter alarms your various timed brew day Steps like hop additions. The alarm I need to create for most recipes is the one for the Whirfloc tablet. I'm religious about all the hop additions, but for some reason I seem to miss Whirfloc on too many beers.

You can set up multiple recipe Timers, which is handy if you'll be re-brewing a several different beers over time. Or you could set up some generic Timers with three hop additions, two hop additions, etc. and reuse them for various brews.

You can have multiple recipe Timers running at once, which would be more useful if there wasn't a a 120 minute limit on the "Boil" which also controls the overall Timer duration. It would be handy to have something over 120 minutes so I could add reminders for all my brew day tasks like "Start heating sparge water." Times greater than two hours would also be handy for the folks who want to brew a traditional Scottish Ale with a long boil for kettle caramelization.

UPDATE
The alarm functionality has been improved from the previous version which only provided a short, soft chime in background mode. You now get a persistent alarm that you need to turn off, regardless if the app is open or not. Unlike the earlier version, you won't be able to miss this one. Along with the alarms you set up, there will be one final alarm that sounds when the boil is done. This app is going to be a handy little helper for me on brew day. I try to chip away at multiple things (the honeydew list) in between my brew day activities, so it will be great to stop worrying about the clock.

If you're upgrading from a previous version, you might have a little difficulty. The upgrade from Version 1.0 didn't fix the alarm functionality for me. I had to delete BrewTimer, then download and install the new version. Not a big problem, and since I had already paid, the second install was free.