Batch schedule improvements

We really struggle to use the batch schedule in its current format for anything other than assigning ‘today’s’ brew to the brewhouse to communicate to the brewers which recipe to use.

I have a few suggestions:

I would much prefer the batch schedule to be switched from vertical to horizontal i.e. days down the vertical and columns for each tank and equipment (canning line/kegging line). This is much easier to see on any given day which tanks are utilised.

It would be great if each ‘beer’ had a predefined number of days in tank, days fermenting, dry hop / fruit additions, diactyl rest, conditioning and defined number of days in brite rather than having to assign days in FV each time you create a batch (this can always be manually adjusted later if required). At the moment there are no stages to tick off other than ‘chill’ and ‘carbonate’. I would love if we could include these further categories (I’m sure there are more useful ones too).

It would be good if when you plan the batch you enter the desired volume and the system then worked out how many recipe turns are required and it books these in to the brew house (based on your bh volume). That would be much simpler to adjust if we later decide to increase or decrease the volume.

The block in the vertical column could then show key actions planned to be taken on any day (e.g. how many dry hops, when the temp changes are required). This would make summarising the cellar activities much clearer.

As the beer progresses manual adjustments can be made to the time in tank and any other action to be taken +/- days depending on progress.

Calendar settings could be predefined to show working week and available brew and packaging slots.

These adjustments would make the batch schedule a workable tool for me and allow me to move away from a monster spreadsheet.

Thanks for posting this, Hazel, and I’m sorry you’re finding this difficult to take advantage of.

I must admit, this would be an enormous change. It’s almost at the “delete everything we’ve got already and start again” level of change. To be honest, I’m not sure why would the other way around be easier to use either? Is this maybe because the other way around is how you’ve been doing it outside of Breww and the change just needs some getting used to? Or is there something I’m missing that would make swapping the columns/rows significantly easier to use?

For the point about automatically scheduling the vessels, how does Automatically plan vessels/batch schedule based on recipe defaults sound?

And for the other “stages” such as dry hopping and your later comment about “show key actions planned”, would Additional stages in brew schedule, such as dry-hopping & centrifuging (batch schedule events) cover what you’re looking for? That would allow you to put other within-batch events onto the main batch schedule. Would you need these to be highlighted on the vessel visualisation, like ‘chill’ and ‘carbonate’ do, or just appear on the schedule as a reminder?

If either of those would be good, please can you give them a vote :+1:

In theory, we could calculate from the brewing system volume and the batch volume, how many turns would be required, but we’d need to probably ask for another brewing system volume as the current individual vessel volumes might not be suitable for this calculation (you can’t really fill the kettle to the brim). Alternatively, Breww could just “learn” this automatically, and suggest something like “Last time you brewed 1000L on Main Brewing System, you used 3 turns.” followed by a button to click to set the number of turns to three.

Setting the number of turns does “book” this into the brewing system on the batch schedule already, but it’s always a single day. Are you looking for Allow recording the number of days that a brew will take and block the brewing system on the schedule/calendar?

The calendar should already be showing Saturday/Sunday in grey and highlighting bank holidays to help you only plan events on working days. (You can change your bank holiday settings in the delivery settings area of Breww if you need - you might be seeing England’s instead of Scotland’s, for example).

Thanks, we do really value your feedback and comments as, without this, it’s hard for us to know how we can improve :+1:

To add one more improvement, it would be great if what is currently in the tanks is kept pinned to the left. At the moment if I swap to next time frame page I’ve got no clue what’s currently in the tanks.

Assuming it hasn’t all been planned in to package, and I haven’t scheduled a clean (can I do that?) then I’d like to keep showing throughout what is in there right now.

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Thanks Alex, I like these suggestions too.

You can schedule one-off cleans manually by going to the equipment that needs cleaning and using the “Manually rigger C&M record” button. More info on this at Cleaning & maintenance records are here 🧹 They cannot be triggered from the batch schedule screen currently.