A homebrew recipe book and batch logevery batch recorded, and the recipes worth repeating

Method

1. 1

   Hand your assistant the notebooks

   Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page. Then give it your recipe sheets, the recipes your brewing software prints or saves, and photos of the brew-day notebook, a few pages at a time. Ask it to make a shelf, Garage brewery, described as “5.5 gallon (21 L) all-grain, electric kettle, fermentation chamber in the garage”, with two documents.

   Recipes gets a finding per beer, titled with its name and style (“Porch Light — American pale ale”): target gravities, bitterness and colour, grain bill, hop schedule, yeast and fermentation plan. Batches gets a finding per brew, titled “Batch 44 — Porch Light, 14 June”, with a two-column table of what happened and the headings Brew day, Fermentation, Packaging and Tasting. Ask it to link each batch to the recipe it brewed, and to leave any figure it cannot read as a question mark.

2. 2

   Check every number in the editor

   This is the step that makes the log worth having. Open each batch next to its notebook page, press Edit, and check the table line by line: a smudged 1.051 read as 1.015 will mislead every comparison after it. Fill in the question marks, file recipes as Observation, and mark the house beers Key.

   When a batch teaches you something, change the recipe and add a line at the bottom: “Changed 2 June: crystal 40 cut from 1 lb to 8 oz, after batch 42.” The recipe’s Revisions keep every earlier version, marked as yours or an assistant’s.

3. 3

   File each new brew the same evening

   From now on, after each brew day, give your assistant the day’s readings — a photo of the page or a few typed lines — and ask it to add the batch to Batches in the same shape: the grain bill as weighed, not as planned; hop additions with their times; the yeast and its pitch temperature; original gravity; fermentation temperatures as set and as read. Add final gravity readings and the bottling date and priming sugar the same way as they happen.

   Read the new finding before you close the laptop. An assistant filling a template will happily copy the recipe’s planned numbers where your page says something else.

4. 4

   Taste twice and write it yourself

   Tasting notes are where a batch log earns its keep, and they are yours to write. Two weeks after packaging and again at six, pour one, open the batch in the iOS app (in TestFlight beta), press Edit, and write under Tasting: appearance, aroma, flavour, mouthfeel, and the one thing you would change. Use the same order every time, so batches compare line by line.

   When something is wrong — buttery, solventy, sour where it should not be — give it a finding of its own, filed as a Problem: “Diacetyl in batch 42”. A problem with its own title is a result of its own in Look up (⌘K), and can be counted across batches.

5. 5

   Ask your assistant to compare batches

   Once a recipe has three or four batches behind it, ask your assistant to compare them in Batches: each batch’s gravities, apparent attenuation, pitch and fermentation temperatures and days to final gravity in a table, then every difference in ingredients or process, set against the tasting notes that followed, with batch numbers cited for every point. It can also leave a proposed note beside a tasting line where two things changed at once.

   What comes back is a list of suspects, not a verdict. An assistant can do arithmetic on your readings and read your notes; it cannot taste the beer, and it can copy a number wrongly. Check anything you will act on, then write your conclusion as a Decision in the recipe.

6. 6

   Share the recipe book with the club

   When the club asks for your pale ale, press Share on Recipes. The link is read-only and shows the recipes without your notes or highlights; copy it when it appears, because the full link is shown only once. A recipe still in development can be left out from its own page and included when it is ready.

   Batches stays private: it is where the failures live, and the club only needs what worked. Set an expiry if you post the link on a public forum, and replace it if it travels further than you meant. When club members tell you how your recipe brewed on their system, leave yourself a Note on the recipe with what they found.