Converting Promash Beer Recipes to BeerXML for BeerSmith & Beer Tools

Way back in late 2004 there was a changing of the guard so to speak with new Beer Recipe tools coming to market and an open standard for the recipe format (BeerXML). At that time I wrote a small script that takes an Exported Promash Recipe file (text format not the raw .rec format) and converts as much as possible to BeerXML format.

14 years later and I still get requests for this. Primarily how can I get it to work on the latest Windows Operating Systems. So here is a link to the script and how I use it on Windows 10.

Conversion Script

Here is the script itself. The easiest way to get it is to click on the link at the bottom of the script which will take you to the GIST on my GITHub account. Hit the RAW button to get the script only in your browser.

On your computer create a new file in Notepad (or NotePad++) if you have it installed and paste in the script contents and save it as pm2bsm.vbe on your computer. Somewhere near the root of a drive (e.g C:\Recipes) is best.

See the gist on github.

Running the Conversion Script

Open a command prompt (WinKey + R => cmd => Ok) and change to the directory you put the pm2bsm.vbe file into.

Type cscript pm2bsm.vbe and the conversion tool will start. (Note: wscript will also work).

From there you can follow the instructions for the Source Promash File to convert and the name of the file you want the tool to write the recipe too.

After providing the source recipe and confirming the output recipe file a summary will be given.

And the recipe will be converted.

The converted recipe in BeerXML format will then be able to be imported into BeerSmith / Beer Tools or any other Beer Recipe tool that supports the BeerXML standard.

Happy recipe converting and brewing.