Recipe vs session

This has come up before, but I wanted to add my $.02.

I have used ProMash for a few years and just recently tried out BeerSmith. I love it. It makes things simple when you need them to be simple, but allows complexity if you are into that sort of thing.

The major issue I've had with switching is the concept of recipe vs brewing session. The "copy to brew log" is a great and convenient way to implement this, but it blurs the line between recipe and session. Other people have made this suggestion, and I agree that it would be better to have a clear distinction between the two.

Here are some possibilities:

1. Add a flag on a recipe that would disable "brew time" fields, like date, brewer, actuals, etc.
This could even be a hidden flag that is toggled when you copy to or from the brew log. This sets up a clear distinction, and a process of only modifying the original recipe if that's what you really want to do. This wouldn't necessarily even require any database changes.

2. Give the option when copying to the brew log to clear the brew time fields.
This doesn't seem as good, but would allow you to "reset" a recipe for use today. For instance, when I copy a recipe to MY brew log, why should it still show that somebody else brewed it, 5 years ago?

Thanks for listening!

Hear hear! It would be great if 'recipes' didn't have the fields that 'sessions' have.

Just bought BeerSmith.  Same issue... Would like to see clearer line drawn between recipe and session.

Thanks,
  I've considered this several times, but have not yet taken the leap.  I'm not sure separating all of the data will help much, but I'm still open to suggestions.

Brad

Brad-

This is the first time I've seen you respond to this suggestion.  I'm a strong advocate for it. 

I've been a professional software engineer for 20 years.  I think a key point in any consideration of such a change would be a well thought out UI for the batch/sessions.  Its always a central factor. But I think in any paradigm shift like this, it is even more key than normal.  In addition, any session based UI should be simple and easy to use in real time during the brew session.  That has a lot of implications for the UI component itself. 

My issue with the current arrangement has a lot to do with the current UI.  The "actual" parameters are buried and spread throughout the various panels of the program.  Further, they are easy to confuse visually from the recipe parameters. 

Even if the current UI were cleaned up to aggregate the "actual" parameters onto a single session page, it would go a long way towards simplifying the use of Beersmith DURING the brewday. 

I've been using BS since, well very long ago...and I still don't use it during the brewday.  I print my custom brewsheet, and record all my measurements on the paper.  Then I go back and backfill BS2 later. 

This is an issue that has caused me some frustration also. I do not know the solution, but one thing that I don't understand is why all the "measured" values have defaults. The first thing I do with a recipe is go in and zero all of them out. I really don't want bogus information in there. But as the last post pointed out, they are spread all over the place which makes it difficult. There are some that I have never paid attention to but as time goes by, I get familiar with more.

I agree that one good measure would be to have a way to copy a recipe without all the brew time data. I actually have never followed the same recipe twice, so having a stable "recipe" record independent of history is not that important to me. If I could copy a recipe without the brew time data and then go in and tweak the recipe according to what I learned before (or not), and add the actual data as I go, that seems to me to be a reasonable compromise.

Recipes have the version number. It'd be nice if that was somehow utilized other than for show. 

For "sessions" right now, I'm copying a recipe and changing the brew date and version number.  I then sort my recipes by brew date.