Although The Small Brew Companion is a huge program it was developed with a clean and easy to navigate interface. When you run SBC the Home screen will be displayed. The Home screen is divided into sections as seen below. The toolbar allows you to jump to the section of SBC that you want to use. The top left section shows the number of recipes you have saved in your My Recipes folder, Community Recipes is the number of currently available community recipes, Sessions is the total number of brewing sessions you have completed. The top right section is updated from time to time with information about SBC. The bottom right contains a calendar with the current month shown. The Brewing & Cleaning Sessions graph will contain your brewing and cleaning sessions for each of the last 12 months. Located at the bottom of the home screen is the Machine Communications section which will show detailed information when your devices are talking to SBC.
You’ll notice on the toolbar some of the menu options have a down arrow to the right of them. This is a shortcut menu allowing you to jump right to the option you want to use.
Clicking the Recipes option on the Toolbar will display the Recipes screen. On this screen you have an option to display the recipes that you have in your My Recipes folder, the Community Recipes option allows you to browse hundreds of recipes that you can brew! SBC contains a full recipe creation option with configured options for either the Pico C/S/Pro’s 1.32 gallons / 5 liter batches or the Z/Zymatic’s 2.5 gallons / 9 liter batches. Within SBC you can add recipes to your shopping list. The shopping list combines ingredients that are used in your recipes making it easier to order / purchase your ingredients from your favorite local or online homebrew supply store. The right section of the Recipes screen allows you to load or import standard BeerXML recipes that you already have or ones that you have found online.
The Brewing Profiles screen provides options to manually create brewing profiles for the Picobrew devices. The Pico S/Pro have a feature that allows an image to be displayed while brewing and SBC has a feature that allows you to create or load an image for this feature. Located on the far right will be a list of the recipe you have OnDeck. OnDeck recipes which are the brewing instructions are the recipes that will show up on your Picobrew machine.
The Sessions screen allows you to start a new PicoFerm, PicoStill, iSpindel or Tilt session as well as you can view your previous cleaning and brewing sessions. The Replay session does just that – it shows the brewing session as it was completed just a whole lot faster!
After you have brewed with your Pico and SBC that session will be available in the My Brewing Log. This section of SBC allows you to record all kinds of information about your beverage.
SBC includes an easy to use backup and restore feature. This allows you to make backup of your files for safe keeping or to move your information to a new computer.
The Configuration screen allows you to change your SBC configuration (this was some of the information you entered in during the initial setup). SBC can send you email and or text session updates while it’s brewing and you configure this information by clicking on the Configure Email & Text button. Although your Pico devices will be automatically detected and setup when they first connect to SBC you can change some settings for them as well as keep notes about the machines in the Configure Equipment section of SBC. The Configure Color Theme allows you to change the appearance of SBC. A couple quick shortcuts are also provided on the Configuration screen that allow you to open the Mobile Hotspot Setup as well as select or change your home brewery logo.
The On The Web screen provides quick access to Facebook Groups, Forums, The SBC Website and lots of support documents for your Pico devices.
The About screen shows some information about The Small Brew Companion.
At the top right corner of SBC you have options to minimize, maximize as well as close SBC. You will be asked to verify that you want to close SBC when clicking on the X just in case you didn’t mean to.
