Building a recipe in the app

A recipe in the app is your plan for a beer: the ingredients, the process and the numbers you expect. The app works the numbers out as you go, and you can replace any of them with your own.

Three ways to start

From scratch: My Recipes → New recipe → New recipe. It starts from your equipment profile (batch size, efficiency, losses), set in Settings → Equipment.
From another app: Import BeerXML takes a file from Brewfather, BeerSmith or Grainfather. The recipe’s own OG, FG and IBU come in as its numbers, beside the app’s suggestion.
From the club: open a brew in Club Brews. Copy to this phone gives you your own copy; Make a variation starts a new recipe based on it, linked to the original so the club sees where it came from.

Filling it in

Work down the page. Each section saves as you go; Save at the bottom writes it to the phone.

About and properties: name, style, batch size, boil time, efficiency, kettle loss. The style card at the top shows your OG, FG, ABV, IBU and colour against the BJCP range.
Fermentables, hops, yeast: tap Add in each section and search the club’s ingredient library, or type your own. Tap any row to edit it.
Yeast amounts go in the unit you pitch: grams or packs for dry yeast; packs, ml or grams for liquid; ml, litres, grams or billion cells for slurry. If your packs aren’t the usual weight (Philly Sour is 11 g), set the pack weight.
Extras and finings: anything else, with when it goes in (mash, boil, whirlpool, pre-pitch, fermentor, packaging) and a time: Whirlfloc in the boil at 10 minutes, nutrient in the fermenter on day 0. Timed boil additions get an alert on brew day with your hops.
Stock: if you keep stock in the app, this card shows what you have for the recipe (and where it’s kept), counting substitutes, and can put the shortfall on your shopping list. Saving the recipe doesn’t add to the list on its own. On My Recipes, the grain, hop and yeast icons on each recipe show the same thing at a glance (see Stock and shopping list).
Charts: the grain bar’s key is the coloured square on each fermentable, and each hop row’s dot is that hop’s colour on the hop timeline.
Water volumes: mash water, sparge water and temperature, pre-boil and post-boil.
Water chemistry: your salts and pH targets (below).
Mash steps and fermentation steps: tap a step to edit it. A step can be room temperature if you don’t control it. Add step copies the last step, ready to change what differs; a step’s copy button duplicates it, and the handle drags it into order. Choose a schedule offers the club’s starting schedules (single infusion, Hochkurz, hefeweizen, protein rest; ale, lager, Kölsch, wheat, saison, pressure and more). Tap one to see what it’s for and its chart, then Use this schedule to replace the steps. Undo puts your old steps back. The schedule that suits your recipe’s yeast comes first (a lager yeast, the lager schedule; a Kölsch or saison yeast, its own), with the temperatures moved into that yeast’s range. Save as a schedule keeps a recipe’s steps under a name you choose; your saved schedules come first in Choose a schedule, where Delete removes one. They’re backed up with your recipes.
Notes: the story of the beer. When you share the recipe with the club, this becomes its page text.

Suggested numbers and your own

Every number the app calculates (OG, FG, IBU, colour, the water volumes, sparge temperature) starts as a suggestion from the recipe. Tap one to type your own. It then shows as manual with an orange border, and it’s used everywhere: brew day, exports and the club. The app’s suggestion stays visible beside it, and Use suggested puts it back.

Use your own numbers when you know better than the calculation: a recipe you’ve already brewed, a measured pre-boil volume, an OG you hit last time. The quickest way to do that for a whole brew is Apply to recipe (see Your brews).

Water

Open Water chemistry and choose:

Enter salts by hand: type the grams of each salt you add. Use this for a recipe you’ve brewed, or if you work your water out elsewhere. Turn on All salts go in the mash if none go in the sparge.
Use the water calculator: pick your source water (the main New Zealand supplies are listed, with where the figures come from) and a style target, and it works out the salts for your recipe’s volumes. It opens on a target for your recipe’s style, or on the water you worked out last time. You can switch to entering them by hand later.

Either way, set pH targets for the mash and sparge and the acid you use (for example “Lactic acid (88%)”). The app records acid as a pH to reach, not a dose: you add it until you hit the target, and note how much on brew day.

Other things you can do

From the bar at the top of a recipe: Brew day, Brewed (record a brew you’ve already done), and the ⋮ menu: Share as BeerXML, Cost breakdown, Delete recipe.

Compare your brews

Under a recipe on My Recipes, open Brew History and tap Compare brews. You get the recipe as it is now beside each time you’ve brewed it, newest first:

Numbers: OG, FG, ABV, IBU, colour, volume into the fermenter and efficiency. A brew shows what you measured, or the plan in italics where you didn’t measure it.
Ingredients: what went in that day, in kilograms and grams, even if you’ve changed the recipe since.

Anything different from the recipe now is highlighted. With a style set, the numbers are green when they’re within the style, amber when they’re just outside it and red when they’re well outside. Changes only hides ingredients that were the same every time. Tap a brew’s date to open it. From there, Apply to recipe makes that brew’s numbers the recipe’s own.