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Brewing calendar / management

hausofstrauss

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I just wanted to share my brewing planning method and thought maybe this type of format would be a good addition to future BeerSmith versions.

Managing Your Brewing Schedule
http://fermware.com/managing-your-brewing-schedule/

014-Full-Schedule-NO-markings-672x372.png
 
That's neat looking. ANy thoughts of doing one for inventory?
 
grathan said:
That's neat looking. ANy thoughts of doing one for inventory?

I had a previous version that tracked equipment, but with all of the conditional statements and/or lookup tables, it became not as user friendly.  It basically added up the equipment used for each column so I would be able to tell when I would be maxing out my equipment or needing to buy more.  For now, I just look at the chart and add things up manually.

I suppose something similar could be used for inventory, but I was hoping by posting it, that other people would use it as a starting off point and add to it or modify for their own use.

For inventory, I keep it fairly simple.  I just have my basic base grains in bulk packaging and I just buy the hops, yeast and other grains as I need them.  My LHBS is close and always has everything I need.
 
I have a spreadsheet that I put together to plan my brewing season, track ingredient usage, purchases and inventory.  After seeing hausofstrauss's spreadsheet, I may incorporate his Gantt chart into the first page of my spreadsheet.  I have also used it to track prices and purchasing from various suppliers (on-line and local) to help with organizing my needs into a few orders.  Oh yeah, I also use it to track actual usage of materials and costs versus projected costs.  Copy is attached and you are welcome to modify it to your own needs.

Old Goat
 

Attachments

  • Brewing Season Costs 0514.xlsx
    111.6 KB · Views: 695
WOW!  That's even more intense.  You must work in something related to accounting if you've got a beer named after Lotus 1-2-3.  Feel free to add whatever element of my scheduling sheet you want.
 
Actually, not accounting.  I am a chemical engineer by training, currently doing product development. 

The beers are actually named after some of my dairy goats.  Yes, I did have a goat named Lotus 1-2-3, a product of Vipassana Meditation and XHTML.  The spreadsheet started out as a way to manage my brewing season, which typically runs from November to April.  This year I managed to sneak in a few summer brew dates.  It allows me to take advantage of bulk grain and hop buys where it makes sense, repitching of yeast cake or planning on freezing yeasts.

A guided tour:

The first page is my scheduling page where I list the recipes and potential brew dates.

The second page is my grain needs.  Column B has the total needs for the recipes, which I import from BeerSmith by saving the shopping list as a .csv file and then copying and pasting the numbers over.  From there the program takes into account the usage and inventory on hand to calculate out what I need to buy.  I do my recipes in metric, but purchase in lbs (an artifact of living in the US), so there is that translation that takes place.  I typically round up small amounts to the nearest 1/4 lb for ease of purchasing.  Amounts over 1 lb, get rounded up to the nearest lb and are used for figuring out an order if I decide to order on-line.

The third sheet is the same for hops.  The columns over on the far right can be ignored, as they are my playing around with doing various SMASH recipes, which I may slip into the schedule this year.

Fourth and fifth are yeast and additives (which I included sugars because it oddly struck me to do it here instead of on the grain page).

The sixth page tracks purchases and current inventory on-hand.

The seventh does the same for usage, breaking it down by recipe,  Figures are entered in from my BeerSmith brew sheet that I print out.

The supplier summary sheet was just a way to try and summarize if it made sense to order on-line versus purchase locally.  This year, since I am buying base grains in bulk, all my grain purchases are local. 

The last sheet contains bulk packaging figures for a number of on-line suppliers.  It allows for price averaging of various sized packages for extract and base grains.

Due to the way I figured pricing on materials, it is a rolling average price.  I am looking at ways to make it a FIFO type of system, but have not had the time to do time weighted tracking of costs yet.  I may never get around to that, as it really is not too important to me.  I also break down the price per bottle, mostly for SWMBO, who is always challenging me while she is sucking down a beer (OK, you spend 9 hrs a day at work, 2 hrs commuting, 2 to 3 hrs taking care of goats, is it really worth spending this time on brewing).  Actually, she supports my brewing habit as much as she supports my farming addiction, so I cannot complain.

--  Old Goat



 
That is utterly awesome!

It's amazing how just brewing once a month requires so many details to keep batch prices minimized.


Be neat if we had a community price sheet and a import script that could compare versions for changes.
 
Actually, what really stood out is that the cost of liquid yeast is easily 30% to 50% of a recipe cost for a 10 liter batch.  Harvesting and freezing the yeast strains I've been using has been the biggest impact on cost savings.  It's mostly a time commitment with only a little material cost to save yeast, and about $0.60 in DME to grow the yeast up to the higher end of pitching rate estimates.

This exercise also lead me to cut back on the strains of yeast that I use.  The benefit is that I now understand some of them a lot better than if I hopped from one strain to another. 

Better understanding of the apparent efficiency of the prominently used yeast strains then gave me a better understanding of the effect of mash temperature and fermentation temperature on final gravity.  I adjusted the apparent attenuation in BeerSmith of some of the yeasts to match my outcome. 

Hops is the next biggest cost and buying in 4 oz quantities, or maybe lb. quantities brings that cost into a reasonable range.

Cost of grain is almost swallowed up by the above costs.  The net gain of improving efficiency from 75% to 85% is negligible in the total picture.  I normally get in the mid 80's for efficiency without any real effort, but if it slipped a little bit, it would not add too much to the overall cost.

It certainly informs me on what is critical to look at and what to breathe easier about.

 
I would also like to see the brewing calendar linked/added, but also would like to see the capability of doing contest overlay for planning purposes.  If the two are added a good follow on would be a soft link to a planned recipe that could print out what is needed to purchased as components are not in inventory.
Just some thoughts, I am still very happy with BeerSmith and I have it tweeked enough that my planned vs. actual OG reading to fermenter is within 0.001.  Hopefully my recipies and fermentation schedules will help me develop contest grade beers (just implementing BrewPi for fermentation control/charting).
Thanks,
Mike
 
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