Planning and Brewing Calendar

[Der Alte Brewer]

I would be interested in a planning and brewing calendar. More specifically, a means to plan my brewing based upon when I want me beer to be ready. The purpose, for me, is four-fold. One, to plan beers to enter in local homebrew club competitions, which we hold each quarter and in which we all brew to a specific style. Two, to plan beers to enter into regional or national BJCP competitions. These all have specific registration and turn-in dates. Third, to brew for local brew club events. Our events will have specific dates on which our kegged beer will need to be ready to serve. And four, brewing for personal events, such as birthday parties to which I want to serve a fresh keg of homebrew.

Currently I enter this information into my Google Calendar. I usually create a multi-week event that begins on brewing day and ends on serving day. I manually calculate fermentation and lagering/condition days for this. I think it would be great to be able to select a recipe and ready-to-serve date then have a schedule populate in a calendar. This schedule would need to be editable for brewer availability. What I mean by that is that tasks, such a brewing, transfer to secondary, kegging, etc. could be changed based upon when the brewer is able to accomplish these tasks. I would also want to be able to export this planning data to the brewing log when I complete each specific event that the log tracks.

BTW, just became a paying members. I had tracked all of my brewing information manually on my PC and did calculations based on formulas in brewing books. Your tool is must simpler and is very comprehensive. Thanks.

 

[Brew Cat]

I would be interested in a planning and brewing calendar. More specifically, a means to plan my brewing based upon when I want me beer to be ready. The purpose, for me, is four-fold. One, to plan beers to enter in local homebrew club competitions, which we hold each quarter and in which we all brew to a specific style. Two, to plan beers to enter into regional or national BJCP competitions. These all have specific registration and turn-in dates. Third, to brew for local brew club events. Our events will have specific dates on which our kegged beer will need to be ready to serve. And four, brewing for personal events, such as birthday parties to which I want to serve a fresh keg of homebrew.

Currently I enter this information into my Google Calendar. I usually create a multi-week event that begins on brewing day and ends on serving day. I manually calculate fermentation and lagering/condition days for this. I think it would be great to be able to select a recipe and ready-to-serve date then have a schedule populate in a calendar. This schedule would need to be editable for brewer availability. What I mean by that is that tasks, such a brewing, transfer to secondary, kegging, etc. could be changed based upon when the brewer is able to accomplish these tasks. I would also want to be able to export this planning data to the brewing log when I complete each specific event that the log tracks.

BTW, just became a paying members. I had tracked all of my brewing information manually on my PC and did calculations based on formulas in brewing books. Your tool is must simpler and is very comprehensive. Thanks.

Seems like a job for some technical types to write a software program
It would need to be editable
I just brew for myself and family parties
So I brew whenever
The only problem I can see is you would need to be pretty consistent and rigid

I find I can't brew to a calendar

 

[J A]

For as long as I've been brewing, I've used a spreadsheet set up as a calendar. I list the rows as days and the columns are designated with specific fermenters and tap lines. I manually enter beer batch names in the appropriate spaces based on the days that each stage takes. I suppose I could pretty easily formulate cells to populate back from an entry in the "on tap" cell so that I'd know when should be started. That would require every beer to ferment for the same amount of time, etc unless there's a reference entry to inform batch-specific timing.

 

[Donoroto]

A “Gantt Chart” can do this. I do not have this need, but for some other (more complex) projects I use simple Gantt charts to work backwards from the end goal to find when it needs to start, along with intermediate task timing.

And welcome to Brewer’s Friend!

 

[Der Alte Brewer]

Thanks for all of the responses and suggestions. To be clear, my idea is a calendar incorporated into Brewer's Friend that integrates with all of my data. So, for example, I want to serve an IPA on July 4th, I could select a recipe and have Brewer's Friend calculate a brew day, fermentation, conditioning, kegging and carbonation calendar. This would become a component within a session that would be updated as I edited and updated the session.

 

[Mont Y. Märzen]

Thanks for all of the responses and suggestions. To be clear, my idea is a calendar incorporated into Brewer's Friend that integrates with all of my data. So, for example, I want to serve an IPA on July 4th, I could select a recipe and have Brewer's Friend calculate a brew day, fermentation, conditioning, kegging and carbonation calendar. This would become a component within a session that would be updated as I edited and updated the session.

Yes, a Gantt Chart can do that quite well to plan and can be migrated to a calendar. And yes, it would be swell if it were integrated into BF, but that feature alone would be quite a lift for writing the code! (there are entire desktop apps just to plan with Gantt Charts)

Personally, I resorted to just scheduling my brewdays x-days in advance of when I needed a beer to be ready based on the end taster. Festival brews I can turn in as little as 3–5days if I absolutely must, but a week is less stressful. My own consumption I usually peg at 2 weeks if I'm using my QuickCarb. Competition brews I prefer to bottle-condition, so they get 4+ weeks depending on style. Using a calendar app I can just copy/paste brews lengths and change their names accordingly.

If I'm not mistaken the highest tier of BF allows you to do this planning and even track fermenters so you can make sure you get something in them when they empty to keep inventory on track. That might be too much scratch for a homebrewer though.

 

[Ward Chillington]

Hmmm...there's a high potential for a crap-ton of variables here unless you are, as @Brew Cat cited, very rigid. I can see fermentation and aging times as constant variables, ie different but always there, then some swags to cover brewday, ingredient gathering, shipping for contest entries......OK...this is becoming too much like a job!

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[J A]

Thanks for all of the responses and suggestions. To be clear, my idea is a calendar incorporated into Brewer's Friend that integrates with all of my data. So, for example, I want to serve an IPA on July 4th, I could select a recipe and have Brewer's Friend calculate a brew day, fermentation, conditioning, kegging and carbonation calendar. This would become a component within a session that would be updated as I edited and updated the session.

it's an interesting idea but would only really work if you brew every batch on exactly the same schedule. Even then every brewer would have a different schedule. Equipment profile would have to be updated to include things like yeast starter time, fermentation time, cold crash, bottle conditioning or keg carbonation time. Would you use the same exact schedule for a Hazy Pale that you'd use for a Lager? What would you do about a stalled fermentation that took 20 days instead of 7? There there's a different calculation if you need 2 or 3 weeks lead time for mailing bottles to competitions...
It might be reasonably easy to set the software up to calculate a total estimated time from brew day to finish based on a number of weeks that could be designated in equipment profile but that would be the same as just marking it on any calendar, paper or digital, and assigning a future brew date when you fill out the brew session information.

 

[Der Alte Brewer]

OK. Gantt charts it is for now. Since I no longer have MS Project, I searched and found that Google Docs has a built-in Gantt chart template. Also, they have an API for developers. So there may not be as much heavy lifting on the code required to import planning and logging data into a Google Docs Gantt chart.