Hello,
Is there a way to view a brewsheet in a recipe as it is being built? It would be really useful to be able to play around with calculations etc before confirming the recipe and using it in a batch. Or is there another way to achieve this?
As an example, I’m trying to build a calculation based on a time reading but not sure how it will work once live.
Cheers
Hi Greg,
Ah, very interesting idea! Not at the moment I’m afraid, but I can see how that would be a really useful addition when building your recipes. Certainly we could look at potentially adding a “Demo brew sheet” mode that allowed you to see the affect your changes would have live.
Although if the issues are specifically around “How will this calculation field work?” a nice solution as well could be the ability to go to the calculation field and see the inputs that it takes as a form, so that you can put some example data in and see what it produces. This would be the quicker of the two to launch, but it might be it doesn’t quite do what you need. Either way let us know!
Now, using times in a formula! Breww basically turns the time that has been recorded, let’s say 13:00, into a Unix timestamp. Without wanting to get too technical, a Unix timestamp is the number of seconds since Thursday, 1 January 1970 (I won’t explain why here 
), but the key is that this time is now a number that can be used in the formula. On its own its pretty pointless, but if you subtracted two times on your brew sheet from each other, for example Mash end - Mash start you would get the difference between the two in minutes (we turn it into minutes, because seconds would probably not be useful information). But if you were just to multiply a time measurement by 2 for example, you would end up with a pretty meaningless number - but then again I have no idea what would be a useful result of 5pm x 2…
Given that it is a count of seconds, you will want to write Mash end - Mash start (as an example), as Mash end will be the bigger number of the two, so that will get you your mash duration as a positive number.
I hope that explains it, but let me know if not!
Cheers,
Max
Hi Max,
Thanks so much for this in depth response!
All makes sense to me, and I do think that being able to put test data in a calculation field will definitely be a good starting point and useful.
Re. the Unix time stamp (and I’m definitely going to google it ), what I was trying to achieve was to capture the start time of the mash (or boil say) and then have a calculation spit out a time for the process’s next step (i.e. next hop addition, end of mash etc). So based on what you mention above, would it be possible to simply add to the time variable in the calculation in seconds, or does it not work that way?
Anyway, no rush! Have a great weekend.
Cheers
This would definitely be a useful feature to implement.
Right now if I want to test a calculation or formula, I have to schedule a dummy beer and actually hit the Brewing button. To make changes, I then need to empty the beer from my vessel, change the recipe and start from scratch.
Also having calculated fields calculate the number of ingredients required would be good, and being able to run this calculation pre-brew day so that an appropriate stock check can be made.