I use Beertools for recipe formulation and find it to be pretty simple and straight forward (although I have been using it for years). My main problem with it is that they do not update the hop varieties often enough, so you have to fake them and note it in the recipe.
I then use Brew365 for mash and sparge calculations, and brewers friend for water modifications.
Then on brew day I use a combination of hand notes on a printed recipe sheet, and a brew day spreadsheet that I made and have saved on google docs.
I use recipe calculators for my recipes and Bru’n water for water/ph adjustment and I like to actually do some of my water additions/volumes on scratch paper. I keep that with me on brewday and take my notes then afterward I sit down and neatly transfer my notes to a notebook becaise I write like a 3 year old. I like grabbing an old notebook and skimming through and looking back on previous batches. I usually fill a small notebook every year so its a time table of my brewing that I like to have.
My notes used to look exactly like Denny’s, but now I’m all BeerSmith and Bru’nwater. Occasionally, I’ll go online to Yeast Calc or Green Bay Rackers for mash space or pitch rate.
I am older, but not ancient. I was trained by the Navy straight out of high school. My first duty station involved working in a shipboard data center with a computer that was only a couple of years younger than I was at that point in time. It was a MIL-SPEC version of the UNIVAC 418 central processing unit (CPU). The MIL-SPEC version was known as the UNIVAC 1218. This machine had discrete logic and ferrite core memory. The UNIVAC 1218 had it’s own motor generator because it required 3-phase 400 cycle power. One had to literally enter the address of the boot routine into the program counter to boot the machine.
I guess I’m a but of both. I use beersmith to help me formulate inside of guidelines I want to stay inside of, and print out the brew day steps. I then take all pertinent notes on those sheets and then transfer into beersmith notes. The original copies are 3 hole punched and then saved in a binder as a hard copy
My thoughts exactly. (Even though I haven’t seen the depth/breadth of changes you have. )
I do recipe design in BeerSmith and water calculations in Bru’n Water. I then transfer that information to my two-sided brew day log. I scribble my actions/readings down on the sheet during the brew day. I also have a spot on the back for tasting notes and competition record, if applicable.
Very similar to the summary page from my excel sheet. I wanted all my values to input to a page that I could print out.
I really like the idea that you had of embedding the equations in the sheet. I’d like to get away from using my spreadsheet except for recipe formulation and Bru’n Water.
Trust me, you will get that point sooner than you think. You will eventually reach a point where you no longer need the spreadsheet for recipe formulation.
There was a point where I calculated all of the metrics, but I rarely calculate IBUs and extraction efficiency percentages these days. I went back to using points per pound per gallon (PPG) and alpha-acid units (AAUs) per unit of time when formulating recipes. A lot of newer brewers scoff at the idea of using these metrics, but they can be just as effective as machine calculated extraction efficiency percentages and IBU values when it comes to formulating reproducible recipes, and they are much simpler to compute. In fact, one can quickly determine amount of grain per gallon needed to formulate a recipe using PPG. For example, I shoot for a mixed-grist extraction rate of 29 PPG when using domestic 2-row as the base malt in a recipe (I can achieve a higher extraction rate, but the quality of the wort suffers with my system). With that PPG value, I can quickly determine the amount of grain that I need to make 5.5-gallons of SNPA-style 1.053 wort.
I’ve been using a notebook to take notes from the books I’m reading. BREWED AWAKENING THE COMPLETE JOY OF HOMEBREWING
And with recipes I come across and wanna try, I mark with book tabs so they’re easy to find.
Nerd alert:
I like BeerSmith but the printouts didn’t really do it for me. I html coded my own, to use a combination of data from BeerSmith and fill-in-the-blank plus free form writing. Once done, you can import the report into BeerSmith as an option to print every time. I print it double sided with my water adj on the back.
Here’s what I’m brewing today.
Math is my least favorite part of anything brewing so I rely heavily on software. Beersmith is my software of choice although there is a good amount of the software I don’t love. I don’t use many of the functions but it is the easy option to figure out basic metrics and piece together a recipe. I use Bru’n Water for water adjustments. Everything gets put together on my blog and kept together as a complete set of notes that way.
I do keep a couple sets of paper records. One is inventory of grain and hops. I know Beersmith has this function but I’m too lazy to input everything. I also have an old journal that I keep with a brief log of all brews. It has a short explanation of the beer and review of what happened to the batch. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose but it’s the only complete record of every brew I have. My blog is missing quite a few early brews and I lost some of my early beersmith recipes when I lost the recipe database while transferring files to a new computer.
JT that’s pretty awesome, mind sharing the html to do that? Would love to incorporate something along those lines into my mash calculator to be able to pull some of the perinent variables from the beerxml files.
I could send you the file I created, but honestly I’m no teacher of HyperText Markup Language. Locating the BeerSmith program on your computer allows you to open the reports folder, which contains the various reports included with the program. Once one is selected it is a matter of creating a copy and opening it in a txt format to edit the html. Once done you save the txt file back as html and put it back in the reports folder. In BeerSmith under options, you can then add the report back into the program and it will treat it as one of its own. Allowing selection from the drop down menu. There are online html editors that attempt to simplify the HyperText Markup Language, but I found them difficult to use for this purpose. Googling BeerSmith custom reports can get you some how to’s and videos as well.
As to how this process could work with other software, I’d be clueless.
I put together my own log sheet. I write like a 2 yr old so when I want nice, neat notes I will use this template. It is fully editable so it’s always a work in progress. But here it is for the most part.
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