Brewing with Brew Day

Brew Day walks you through brewing a recipe now, with timers and alerts for each step. It also starts the batch: the record of this brew and what you measured.

If you’ve already brewed and just want to record it, use Brewed instead (see Your brews).

Starting

Open a recipe and tap Brew day, or use Start brew day on Home. The app opens a session for that recipe. You can run more than one session at once; each has its own tab at the top of Brew Day. Tap a recipe that’s already brewing and the app opens its session rather than a second one.

If you keep stock, the app checks it as soon as the session has a recipe. First it asks about anything a substitute could cover, one ingredient at a time: tap Use on one, or Skip. Then it lists everything still missing, with the substitutes you chose under Using instead, and Add to shopping list. You can change a substitute, or how much of it you’ll use, from the Substitutes card in Preparation until you Start Mash. Choosing a different recipe in a session asks again. See Stock and shopping list.

The phases

Brew Day has five phases. Tap through them in order, or jump with the bar at the top.

Preparation: your water volumes, sparge water and temperature, and the strike temperature, worked out from your grain temperature (set it on the day if your grain is colder or warmer than usual). The water card lists the salts and pH targets to tick off.
Mash: a timer for each mash step. Start Mash also takes the recipe’s ingredients out of your stock, after showing you what will come out (see Stock and shopping list).
Boil: the boil timer with every hop and timed addition (Whirlfloc at 10 minutes, and so on). The app alerts you when each is due, even with the phone locked. The card at the top shows what’s next.
Post-boil: chill target, OG check against the recipe, and what to pitch.
Fermentation: the fermentation steps, and Open Brew Log.

Recording measurements as you go

In the mash, boil and post-boil phases there’s a Measurements card. Tap it to record what you measure: mash and sparge volumes, mash pH, pre-boil and post-boil volume and gravity, the salts and acid you actually added, the volume into the fermenter. The recipe’s numbers show as hints; leave anything you didn’t measure blank. What you enter is kept with the session (even if the phone restarts) and goes into the brew log when it opens.

The fermentation log

Open Brew Log in the fermentation phase starts the batch record. It holds:

your OG and volume into the fermenter,
gravity readings you add by hand, or from a RAPT Pill if you’ve connected one (Settings → RAPT Pill),
notes,
the measurements, with the recipe’s targets beside them, and Measurements to add more.

A hand-entered temperature must be between -5 and 40 °C, and a gravity between 0.990 and 1.150.

Fixing a reading

A typo in one reading can spoil the graph. Tap Readings under the graph, or tap the point on the graph, to see every reading, newest first. Any that look wrong are marked in red. Tap a reading to correct it, or to delete it (Undo brings it back). A RAPT Pill reading you’ve corrected or deleted stays that way when the app fetches the Pill’s readings again.

The copy and share buttons at the top give you all the readings as CSV, to paste into a spreadsheet or another brewing program. The same Readings list is on a finished brew.

The brew shows on Home under Fermenting until you finish it.

Finishing

When the beer is done, tap Complete Brew Day at the bottom of the log. Add the FG (or leave it blank) and any final notes. The brew moves to the recipe’s brew history, where you can add packaging and final pH, compare it with the recipe, and apply it to the recipe.

If you started one by mistake

In the fermentation log, ⋮ → Discard this brew day deletes the log and closes the session. It can put the ingredients back in stock too.

Your brews: measurements and Apply to recipe
The club’s All-grain brew day walkthrough, for the brewing itself.