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

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

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

Vessels can either be planned manually or automatically by telling Breww how to plan them (and then tweaked manually if required)

Manually planning vessel usage

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 short video below 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.)

Automatically planning vessel usage

This works by defining a “Vessel plan”, telling Breww that your recipe uses this vessel plan, and then applying this to each batch you create.

To get started, go to ProductionViewRecipesVessel plans. From here, you can create and manage your vessel plans.

Creating a new vessel plan

Click on New vessel plan to make a fresh vessel plan. You’ll see a page that looks a bit like the below screenshot. At the top, you can add vessel requirements to the plan and further down, you can see a preview of how this looks on a “calendar”.

In the example below, Breww would be looking for a 900+ Litre Fermenter which will be filled for 5 days, followed by an 850+ Litre Holding Tank that can be filled for the next 5 days, and finally, an 850+ Litre Brite Tank that will be filled for the next 3 days.

Using the “Can be split over X vessels” option, you can tell Breww to split the volume over multiple vessels if you don’t have a single vessel big enough for the required volume. If you enter 1 for this option, the full volume must be in a single vessel, but if you enter 2, for example, a 900 Litre requirement could be split over two vessels that were not big enough on their own but were big enough when combined.

Assigning the plan to a recipe

Once the plan has been designed, you need to update each of your recipes to use this plan. This structure means that you can have a number of different plans (e.g. one for ales and one for lagers) and re-use them across your recipes.

Taking advantage of automatic scheduling

Now, simply create a brand new batch, and if you choose a recipe that has an associated vessel plan, you’ll see a new option above the calendar view for planning vessel usage:

When you click this button, you’ll be prompted for a batch start date. Upon confirming the date, Breww will automatically apply the vessel schedule for you, a bit like in this animated screenshot:

2023-10-12 17.23.08

At this point, you are free to adjust the schedule manually if you need to and save the planned batch when you’re ready.

What if I don’t have vessels available?

If Breww cannot schedule some or all of the required vessels, you’ll be shown a message explaining this and may need to adjust your start date. There may also be times when you know that you can get away with a vessel plan that doesn’t strictly follow the rules you told Breww in the “Vessel plan”, in which case you can manually plan a schedule that doesn’t strictly follow the rules (e.g. using a fermenter instead of a holding tank, or reducing the time in a vessel by one day).

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:

overlapping vessels

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).

2 Likes

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

2 Likes

Nice improvement. 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:

Thanks :+1:

4 Likes

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

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 :+1:

A post was split to a new topic: Automatically adjust brewing date if the first vessel planned is moved forwards/backwards on the batch schedule calendar