Additional stages/tasks in brew schedule, such as dry-hopping & centrifuging (batch schedule events)

[jack-walker]

Morning,

Is there a way to add additional steps into the brew schedule? For example, we sometime filter beer into another tank, and it can take several days for us to package an entire tank. Id love to be able to visualise this so I can keep on top of the constant tank juggling!

Many thanks,

Jack

[luke]

Hi Jack,

Welcome to the Breww Community, and thanks for sharing a great idea.

Firstly for planned packagings - if you add these to your batches, Breww will show them on the batch schedule. When adding a planned packaging, you enter the date so if you know for example that you can only package 500 cans per day, you could enter 500 cans, three times on consecutive days rather than entering a total of 1500 cans. This would then be represented on the batch schedule for you.

For other steps/tasks, we’ve been toying with how best to do this for a while. We’ve been thinking that you could add “batch schedule events” to a recipe. These could allow you to pick an icon, enter some text and a number of days after the batch was first transferred to a vessel (typically the day it moves from the brewing system to the fermenter). We would then copy these from the recipe to the batch on start of the batch and allow you to add/modify them as needed on a batch-sepcific level.

These events could then be shown on the batch schedule and would allow it to be really customisable to the information that you’d like to show. You could add notes like “Drop hop”, “Filter” or “Start carbonation”, for example.

How does this sound to you? If you’ve any other ideas of how this could be done better, please do say.

Thanks,

Luke

[jack-walker]

Sorry for the late reply, finally getting around to full functionality on our side.

Thanks for the info on planned packaging, very very useful!

Your idea sounds spot on for additional steps. I have already added “filtration” steps to recipes that require it, and to drop this into the brew scheduler would really help me work out what needs to go where and when.

Thanks!

Jack

[luke]

Fantastic, thanks Jack!

We’ll update you here when we’ve made some progress on this for you.

[luke]

Following the topic linked below, this could be further improved to allow “ticking off” completed events, and a list of outstanding events shown on the production dashboard, similarly to how “Daily batch readings” are shown.

Adding custom fields in 'Daily Batch Readings Required'

HI, Could you add the ability for us to add our own custom field in the ‘Daily Batch Readings Required’ please. Thank you Rob

[robert-cherowbrier]

Hi Luke, Yes this is exactly what we are after, a daily list of outstanding events on the dashboard with the ability to be ‘Ticked off’ when completed.
Thanks
Rob

[luke]

Excellent, thanks Rob. If you can give this a vote, it will move it up the priority list and therefore be done sooner. I’ll close the other request

[luke]

This is related to Increasing the number of the tank status icons (Chilling and Carbonated) as the two could share information

[matthias-seidl]

This would be so critical and one of the reasons as mentioned to James why I cannot see us moving away from our excel batch scheduling as the capabilities of Breww in that regards are just not suffice.

We would need a better visualisation of the tasks within the schedule including:

• beer transfers
• yeast harvest (connected with yeast management → generation tracking, viability etc) - how much yeast is harvested from which tank and goes into which other tanks
• brew days of a batch on two different days (quadruple brew depicted as 2x/2x on Monday/Tuesday
• assigning tasks to different accounts (brewers)
• other random custom events (brewery tours, tank beer pick ups)

That would be extremely helpful!

Many thanks

Kind regards
Matthias

[luke]

Thanks, for the extra suggestions, Matthias, this is really useful information.

It might also be worth you giving Allow recording the number of days that a brew will take and block the brewing system on the schedule/calendar a vote as one of your suggestions is on that separate thread.

[weston-shepherd]

We create recipes with all the needed steps, checks, ingredient additions and the required timing of those steps. It would be hugely helpful to have these things generate a task for the cellar team. For example: You create a recipe for an IPA that gets a temperature change on day 2 of fermentation, a yeast harvest on day 7 of fermentation, a dry hop also on day 7, a hop dump on day 9 and a diacetyl test and crash on day 10. Breww automatically creates a task for each one of these events so that the brewer/cellar person knows all the tasks that need to be completed on a given day.

This could include any fermentation steps in Breww (temp changes, ingredient additions, checks, etc). It would minimize missed steps/mistakes, and would save our team (and I’m sure almost every other brewery) a tremendous amount of time. It would also eliminate the necessity of involving other calendars, schedules, apps/project management tools that breweries are currently using in addition to breww to manage these tasks.

[luke]

Thanks for the great suggestion, Weston. I’ve merged your thread with an existing thread for an extremely similar suggestion (to keep all the votes and conversations in one place).

[reg-peer]

Hi There,

I’ve gone over the suggestions above and would have to agree with the other users.
It would be very helpful if Breww had a function of the Production Schedule to show transfer dates, dry hop dates, projected cold crash dates. Having these visuals would be helpful myself and the rest of the production team.

Cheers,
Reg

[sahar-nevo]

I think that this idea should include also creating an automatic cleaning task for the vessel as soon as the vessel is been emptied as part of the schedule.

[luke]

This should already be possible using Cleaning and maintenance records. If this doesn’t do what you need, could you give more information on how you’d like it to be different? Thank you.

[david-williams]

improving the batch schedule sounds great. adding transfers into ct as a dated visual reference, chilling date, dated addtions such as sugar or fruit or dryhop. also having tank cip as a dated visual addtion as often its not on transfer or fill date for us. really just being able to add anything at any time whether it pulls through to another part of the software or not would be good. integration to blocking or alerts for daily tasks would be better but just having some input would mean i dont still have to use a seperate brew schedule.

[luke]

This now live with production tasks

• Recipe work becomes tasks. The work in your recipes becomes tasks for the brewer or cellar team on the day it’s due. Each stage of the brew sheet is a task, and any single step, such as a temperature change, yeast harvest or dry hop, can be given a task of its own. You choose who does each part when you prepare a batch.
• Markers on the batch schedule. Any recipe step, such as a dry hop, a filtration or a centrifuge, can be shown as its own task. It then appears as a marker on the vessel the batch is in that day, so you can see it alongside your tank plan. Markers show when a step is overdue or done, and dashed markers show steps for batches you haven’t prepared yet.
• Marking events done. Each task completes itself when the step is recorded on the brew sheet, and everyone’s outstanding work is listed on their production day, as Rob asked.
• Transfers, packagings and cleaning also become tasks, and cleaning and maintenance, including what’s coming up, shows on the production calendar.

There has been a long tail of ideas in this thread, so if anyone would like to see anything extra, please open a new feature request for what you’re looking for.

Read more in the announcement. The finer details are in Batch schedule and Preparing a batch’s production tasks.