Calculations on brew sheets with ingredients specifications

Ideas & feature requests
1

Hi
The only thing stopping us from moving off our excel brew sheets onto breww completely is that we still cannot do calculations for things like alpha/bittering and grain bills based on their extract and moisture. Do you have any timescales for getting these built into the brewsheets
Thanks
John

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2

Hi John,

Yes, we’re planning on adding these quite soon. I’d expect these things to be added within the next couple of months. We’ll keep you updated.

Cheers,
Matt

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3

Hi,
With the Yeast management feature now live, this is the last thing stopping us to move totally from excel to Breww.
Is there any release date on that topic?
Cheers,
Vincent

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4

Thanks, Vincent and sorry for the delay getting back to you. This is a high priority request and will be added soon. We’ve not got a date on this yet, but I can confirm it’s right near the front of the queue, so shouldn’t be too much longer :grin:

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5

Any update on the timing of this?

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6

@john-cussons I’m afraid we haven’t anything solid yet.

We’re working on a major production upgrade at the moment that will take “brew day” to new heights that could only have been dreamed of before! It’s going to also open the door to improved recipe functionality and other related features, so this should be able to follow shortly behind the new brew day features.

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7

Hi all! Breww now supports automatically adjusting the quantity of a hop added to a batch based on the alpha acid of the batch used :boom:

You can read more about how it works here:

For the other variable quantity calculations you’d like to see, would you mind letting us know what data you’d like to store on a per-ingredient batch, and recipe line basis (i.e. like Alpha acid for each batch of hops) and how’d you like them adjusted based on each batch added? That will help us prioritise what we add next!

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8

Following on from Max’s comments:

Is there anything more that people would like here, or can we mark this request as complete? Thanks.

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9

Hi
Sorry we were manic before Xmas and so just managed to get the hops piece working but didn’t have time to reply to this. The other area that needs to be in this is the grain bill calculations for yield, moisture and colour. If these are added then our spreadsheets go away.
Cheers
John

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10

No worries, John, I just wanted to check :smile:

Would you mind sharing the formulas that you use to make sure we’re on the same page? But if you’d rather not, then don’t worry :+1:

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11

Hi Luke
I don’t mind sharing but it would be more useful to actually have a chat about this and explain what we do before just sending the spreadsheet. You would also need to check this with some others I think as I wouldn’t say I have the definitive answer but I can certainly share what I have.
Cheers
John

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12

Have sent you a message Luke

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15

Thanks, John and Steve, this is all really useful information.

We’re not at the stage of being able to start implementing the other ideas right now, but we’ve got all the notes here (and Steve’s other message) saved.

We’ll be in touch when we’re ready to continue with this project and can hopefully arrange some calls to make sure we’re hitting the nail on the head :+1:

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16

Hi Luke,

Among the other functionalities that would be great for production, we would love to see:

Ingredient:
For each Malt lot the possibility to record EBC, moisture content and extract.
For each Hop Lot the overall oil content.
Those parameters should then be taken in account when designing the recipe and when brewing the beer to give us colour, yield and oil content in the beer. With the new Alpha acids feature, it would be useful to have an IBU calculation (and that is valid for all parameter listed above) that depends on the volume yielded while also taking in account the volume losses during the process (volume evaporated, volume left behind in the kettle and other equipments).

System Settings:
We would love to be able to set more parameters specific to each brewhouse:
Thermal mass of the mash tun
Grain absorption rate in L/kg
Wort cooling shrinkage in %
Malt Heat Capacity
Evaporation rate in L/hour

Integrated process calculators
We use calculators in our Breww brew sheet but they are not connected to the ingredients specifics, the system settings or the rest of the brew. We need calculated fields that are integrated to the system.

Mash:
Striking temperature calculator for the mash water depending on grain temp (variable), Grain amount (variable), Grain to water ratio (variable), thermal mass of the mash tun (constant), Grain absorption rate (constant), Malt heat capacity (constant) and mash temperature target (variable), .

Sparging:
Depending on the batch, I have different kettle volume targets.
Depending on the mash specifics (water and malt parameters) and on lautering specifics (runnings stopping at certain plato) I will need a certain sparge volume.
It would be useful to have a sparge volume calculator to achieve target volumes in the kettle.

Dilution calculator:
We always use a dilution calculator to work out our water addition in the kettle after the boil to achieve our target gravity. We take a wort sample at the start of boil and measure the preboil gravity. We know the volume of wort we will loose from evaporation (constant), we know the volume of wort we have before the boil and the volume we will have after the boil. We can therefore calculate the gravity at end of boil and the water addition needed to achieve our target OG.

Brewhouse efficiency:
We like to know how efficient our Mash tun is. That is known by gravity and volume before boil in the kettle.
We also like to know the efficiency of our brewhouse. Mash Tun efficiency pondered by the volumes losses in the system, Wort left behind in the hop bed and all equipments.

While we can create a lot of those calculated fields ourselves, they need to be connected to the IBU, EBC, Oil content, Gravity and specific parameters of the Brewhouse in order to have accurate data on each batch.

To do all those and develop new recipies, we use Promash. But using Promash in parallel to BrewW isn’t ideal we would like to have it all in BrewW.

Happy to connect further and help if I can.

Cheers

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17

Thanks, Vincent, for such a detailed response, this is incredibly useful.

I hope it’s not too long before we can get back to this project, and everyone’s input on this will be so useful. We’ll let you know if we have any questions in the meantime :+1:

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18

Happy to spend time on zoom with your team to show them the promash software and illustrate how to link those different data!

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19

@luke - Very interested in seeing any new developments in the brew-day input section as this is what is holding me back from using Breww as my brewday tool (currently being used only for compliance and stock management) Great detail from @vincent-de-soyres and would be happy to see many of those features. If required, happy to jump on a call, share my brew-day calcs or stress-test any prototypes you come up with?

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20

@luke
Vincent pretty much covered everything I’d like to see. I’d also add crop year to the hops in addition to alpha-acids & oil content.

For malt, as Vincent said: colour (EBC), moisture, and extract (LDK). Also (albeit less critical), protein content & FAN, maybe also the other things that are on a COA. (Certificate of Analysis | Crisp Brewing and Distilling Malt Analysis).

What would really be useful is to be able to create open-ended user-defined categories for specifications we can add to ingredients. Maybe a button to add an additional field that gets applied to all of a category of ingredient. Then as we receive goods, we can put the actuals in for each batch code of ingredient. I’d like these fields to be exportable with the full ingredient inventory, as I could then use breww as my master database for ingredient specs that my recipe builder points to (I have an excel file that I use to build recipes & brewsheets, and it uses validated-data and vlookup to pull specifications and pricing from my master ingredient list). I’m happy to talk through this and demonstrate what I’m doing if you’d like.

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21

@ Luke Cousins - Is there any progress on the “Calculations on brew sheets with ingredients specifications” keen to start using Breww for our whole operation? If not, can I upload it into Breww brew sheets from a CSV download from my spreadsheet?

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22

There’s not been any further progress on this yet, I’m afraid. We’re working hard on improving Breww all the time, but with the requests coming in as quickly as they do, it can be hard to keep up with! We will always post an update on the thread if it’s been completed.

You can upload files to batches in Breww, and they get stored safely in a list of files for record keeping, rather than being linked into your brew sheet as such. An upload cannot change the data stored in Breww’s brew sheet, but you can keep a copy of a spreadsheet brew sheet against the batch, if that’s what you’re looking for?

You can also manually create custom calculations in Breww already and show these on your brew sheet, and these can use readings entered into the brew sheet earlier, but they just cannot use information linked to specific batches of ingredients yet (other than alpha acids calcs). For more on this, please see the “Calculated fields” section at 📘 Introduction to production

Cheers

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