Enhanced Production Featues

[evan-watts]

The production tools don’t currently give us what we need to run our brewday entirely in Breww. We don’t have the ability to do the complex calculations we need to calculate things such as water chemistry, mash efficiency, or bittering hop additions. It also looks like it will be tedious to maintain our recipes because measurement requirements are attached to each recipe, so if we change part of our process, we have to update all of our recipes. If you’re working on expanding the production features, here are a few suggestions to guide that development:

-Define the data management process (required measurements, calculations, etc.) separately from the recipe.

-Define recipes in ratios (percentages for malts, lbs/bbl for hops) so that they scale to different brewing systems or batch sizes

-More robust scaling tools that scale malt based on mash efficiency, batch size, and losses, and hops based on IBU target, batch size, and losses

-Start with the recipe, scale to the system/batch size/number of turns for ordering ingredients/building bill of materials, plug in lot attributes and adjust quantities for brewing.

-Allow custom functions that can be reused across calculated fields

-Include common brewing functions (see MBAA Handbook of Basic Brewing Calculations)

It’s going to be hard to communicate everything that would need to go into this in a short note here, so let me know how I can help. Here is a link to the Excel notebook we currently brew with if you want to see how we handle things:

Recipe Template.xlsm

It’s not really cleaned up for outside eyes (there are some links that won’t work for you, and the multi-turn features are shaky), but hopefully it gives you an idea of how we approach things

[luke]

Thanks for the great suggestions, Evan.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit our feature request guidelines. Each thread must be for one single feature and this is a collection of many features (more on this here). For this reason, I’ve set it to auto-close in a couple of weeks. That should give us time to have some productive discussion first, as there is a lot of really useful information in here. When it closes, anyone who has voted for it in the meantime will get their vote back to use elsewhere. What we need is the votes to sit with the individual feature requests, rather than the more general “Enhanced production features”.

Despite what I’ve said above, thank you for bringing these points up, it is very useful information and will help us make Breww even better, even if it can’t sit open for picking up votes

I’ll cover each of your points below:

Define the data management process (required measurements, calculations, etc.) separately from the recipe.

I think this would be covered by Reusable/shared recipe stages (when edited the changes apply to all recipes using them). Do you agree?

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Define recipes in ratios (percentages for malts, lbs/bbl for hops) so that they scale to different brewing systems or batch sizes

Breww already has full support for scaling, so I don’t think this is needed. It works slightly differently from how you suggest. You define a batch size on the recipe and enter all ingredients as if you were brewing a batch of this size. Then when you make an actual batch, if you enter a different batch size, Breww will scale the ingredients accordingly (assuming you have this option checked when starting the batch). More on how this works in our help guide: How does Breww scale the ingredients on batches (and how does this change with multi-turn batches)?

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More robust scaling tools that scale malt based on mash efficiency, batch size, and losses, and hops based on IBU target, batch size, and losses

Some of this already exists, such as adjusting hop quantity for alpha acids, and of course batch size (as above). And I think the rest would be covered by a combination of:

• Calculations on brew sheets with ingredients specifications
• Recipe-level variables for Calculated Fields, e.g. allow "Add ingredient" quantity to be the result of a calculation

Please comment on those threads if you feel more is context is needed or if you think an extra feature request is required, please open one for the specific request.

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Start with the recipe, scale to the system/batch size/number of turns for ordering ingredients/building bill of materials, plug in lot attributes and adjust quantities for brewing.

I might be wrong, but I think this is all covered by the above existing features and feature requests. Please do let me know if you disagree.

Allow custom functions that can be reused across calculated fields

How does this differ from our existing Calculated fields feature? Especially when it has the extras of the recipe-level variables feature request mentioned above? Again, if you think more is needed here that’s not covered, please do comment on related existing requests or open new requests for the specific features that you’re looking for.

Include common brewing functions (see MBAA Handbook of Basic Brewing Calculations)

We’re soon expecting to work on exactly this, as part of “production focus” that we’re working on. That production focus also includes some of the above-mentioned feature requests, so a lot is coming to this area of Breww soon

I’ve ordered us a copy of that book, thank you for the recommendation! And, thanks for sharing your existing recipe template, that’s also useful for us to see when planning and working through some of the features in our production focus. Thank you

Thanks again for raising this. There’s a lot of helpful information in here.

[evan-watts]

Ok, no problem. I’ll answer the questions and hopefully it’s useful for you guys.

Define data management process separately from the recipe.

Yes, reusable stages would address most of this. Personally I would separate out the process from the recipe entirely, but if you’re able to update a reusable stage and have that automatically update every recipe that uses it, I think that would address this need in practice.

Define recipes in ratios.

The key issue with defining a recipe in terms of specific amounts of ingredients is that ingredients don’t scale linearly. For example, we have a “15 bbl” brewhouse that we can knockout up to 17 bbl into the fermenter for a lighter beer, but might do a 12 bbl batch instead if we’re testing a new recipe. We have roughly one bbl of loss between the bottom of the kettle and piping, which is 5.9% in a full batch, but 8.3% in a test batch. We also get different efficiency with different brewing systems, grist sizes, or base malts (after adjusting for potential extract), so we make adjustments there if we have to sub that simply scaling linearly won’t address. In practice, this is what we’ve found is the easiest and most accurate way to define and scale a recipe:

Malt:
Define target gravity and malts as percentages
Scale by working backward from batch size to end of boil volume, use the target gravity to find required extract, use mash efficiency to calculate total potential extract from malt, use avg potential extract to calculate total malt required, then multiply by percentage of each malt to get how much of each. It may sound a bit tedious, but not when it’s automated.

Hops:
Define whirlpool and dry hops as lbs/bbl, and adjust bittering hops to hit target IBUs.
Scale whirlpool hops by end of boil volume (not fermenter volume), calculate their IBU contributions based on hop lot AA%, then calculate the bittering addition required to hit your IBU target.

Allow custom functions that can be reused across calculated fields

Writing custom function would help make building calculated fields easier. If you have a piece of a calculation that is reused in different places, it would be much easier to write that function once and reuse it. Some examples might be an IBU formula or thermal expansion/contraction of water.

I hope that helps! Those are just a couple suggestions based on our experience. You can check out the spreadsheet for an in depth look at how we define our recipes, scale to prep for a batch, brewday calculations, etc.

[luke]

Thanks Evan, this is really useful.

Define data management process separately from the recipe

Let’s stick with the reusable stages idea for now. We can further iterate on that after the first part is built, if needed, but I think this is the right route to take initially.

Define recipes in ratios

Would you mind creating a feature request specifically for this, so we can keep track of this idea? If I’m honest, I don’t think we’ll turn our entire recipe system on its head, especially as we wouldn’t have the information required to migrate everyone’s existing recipes to a different structure.

I also think that Recipe-level variables for Calculated Fields, e.g. allow “Add ingredient” quantity to be the result of a calculation will likely solve this for you. We expect to start working on that feature request soon, so we’ll go down that part initially and then once done, with your new request on the list, we can see if it’s still needed and how best to implement it at that point.

Allow custom functions that can be reused across calculated fields

This makes total sense and is a great suggestion. Can you please raise a feature request for this so we can keep track of it?