How to plan which vessels will be used on a beer batch

[luke]

When entering a beer batch into Breww, you can choose which vessels (fermenters, brite tanks, barrels, etc) the batch should use.

At any time, you can see an overview of all your batches and their vessel usage at Production → Batch schedule. As you can plan your batches in advance, this is really useful for capacity planning.

When you add a batch to Breww (that’s brewed on-site), you’ll see a calendar in the form on which you can “draw” events to indicate the vessels used in the batch. If you need to adjust a planned event, you can move the events by dragging and dropping them or resizing them by dragging from the start or end. To remove an event completely, simply click on it and confirm. Breww will keep an eye on your schedule as you work on it and show you below the calendar when the batch will be started (based on the schedule) and if there are any gaps in the planned vessels.

Please see the below short video to guide you through this process:

(Hint: If the above video is too small, click on the “maximise” button at the bottom-right of it to view it in full-screen.)

FAQs

How many vessels can I schedule for a single batch?

You can schedule as many vessels as you need to - just keep “drawing lines” on the calendar.

How do I schedule a vessel for a date that’s already in use?

If you need to schedule a vessel that overlaps with an existing “event”, make sure to start drawing the usage on the calendar by clicking in the white space underneath the existing event, as otherwise, Breww will think you’re trying to interact with the existing event. Here’s a short clip to demonstrate this:

How do I schedule a start date without planning any vessels?

If you plan any vessels to use in your batch, then Breww will automatically determine the batch start date from the date that the first vessel is used. If you don’t plan any vessels, then you can choose a planned start date from an input that shows below the vessel planning calendar (this is hidden if you have any vessels planned).

[john-cussons]

Brilliant. That is one hell of an improvement! Well done to all the team

[tom-bignell]

Nice improvement. Wouldn’t it be logical to default set the vessel days based on the selected recipe though?

[luke]

@tom-bignell

Wouldn’t it be logical to default set the vessel days based on the selected recipe though?

Thanks Tom, yes, this is something we’ve been thinking about internally too. We’d need more information than just the number of days if we wanted to allow you to plan transfers and ensure we chose a vessel with enough capacity. I’ve put this forward in the feature requests area, so if you’d like to see this functionality added to Breww, please give this a vote:

Automatically plan vessels based on receipe defaults

With the new vessel planning feature now complete, the door is open for further improvements. An idea that we’ve had internally and was recently suggested by one of our great community members, would be to set the vessel requirements on a recipe and then have Breww pre-populate the vessel schedule for a batch for you. This could simply be a default when you create a batch and you’d be free to change it if you need to. On a recipe, we’d ask for your vessel requirements. You’d be able to add mul…

Thanks

[john-cussons]

Been using this alot over the last few days. The only thing I don’t like about the update is that you have lost the link between the various bits of the brew. I.e. if I extend the fermentation period it doesn’t move the point at which the brew moves to the conditioning tank. I think this is a shame as that increases the amount of work. I presume there is a reason for this such as if you split the batch but would be useful if it was an option to be able to turn off and on when you are creating a batch. i.e. default to on but turn off if you want to override.
The other piece of feedback I would add is the ability to have more than two types of vessel. i.e primary and secondary. I’d like a tertiary as to me our bright tank is third stage and at the moment it sits in the middle of the conditioning tanks and would be better to be able to move it out.
thanks

[luke]

Thanks for the feedback, John. The previous method worked ok if you only ever used exactly two vessels, but if you wanted to use more than two (or even in some situations when only using one), it had problems.

You’re right that Breww no longer knows when a batch transitions from fermenting to conditioning. We’re planning on resolving this with Additional stages in brew schedule (batch schedule events) (and to some extent Increasing the number of the tank status icons (Chilling and Carbonated)) which should allow this to be far superior to just the two previous stages of fermenting and conditioning, as you’ll be able to add anything extra that you’d like, such as dry hopping. If you’d like to see this, could you give those a vote?

We’ve been planning internally to create the ability to customise the vessel groups, which would allow you to add Tertiary vessels. I’ve just added this here on the community, so if you’d like to see this, please give it a vote too Custom vessel groupings

Thanks again for the feedback