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Recipe suggestion from inventory

angusl

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(Standard excuse - searched but did not find this exact request)

I have some inventory of specialty grains and it would be nice to have a utility that can suggest recipes that can be made with what is on hand.  I saw an option discussed where all recipes from My Recipes that can be made from the inventory can be listed, but it seems that option was not added.  Any chances that can be added, or is it already in there and I am just not seeing it?

Thanks.

Angus
 
I am assuming a bit here, but brewers buying the "authentic" grains may already know enough to buy and use what they need to brew their objective.  So is this tool needed mostly by newer brewers that are not familiar with a wide range of styles and the grains that typically are used to create them?

It would be nice to codify the style  knowledge of someone like JZ and enter 2-3 grains and have it spit out the styles that use those grains, but's hard to imagine a useful (specific-enough) model for the typical grains that most homebrewers have sitting around. 

When you start to layer in suitable substitutes (Caravienne, CaraMunich, Crystal 20, etc.) and amounts on hand, it would get very generic quite quickly. 

Thinking about it now, however, I could see it possibly working if we entered the grains we have, in the amounts we want to use, and the Style Selector "graying out" all styles that don't fit the SRM of what we've entered.  We sorta have that already with those colorized ranges in Design View.  (And that's how I build hop additions, throw them all in the Recipe, and then modify to hit the IBU target I want.)  But SRM is a small part of using certain grains; for ex, Brown malt and Crystal 60 are each ~60 lovibond, but taste wildly different. 

Any software people got ideas on how to actually make it work? 
 
The only reason for purchasing Beersmith for me was that I have over 50 types of specialty grains that I have forgotten which recipes they were for. And didn't want to get into this situation again.

It is easy to buy a pound of hops when you only need 6 oz. when the price is the same. Or a recipe calls of 8oz of grain but the shop only sells by the pound.

I could import a bunch of random Beersmith recipes or even type a bunch in tediously, but atm there is no point in doing so. They would just sit in some random beersmith folder until I decide to browse through it (which isn't likely given the large Tobrew list in my browser favorites and text files on the computer, which also cannot be sorted by ingredients)



 
In my mind, that's the rub.  Some brewers catalog more by recipe, and others by style guidelines. 

Are you looking for options to brew any style for which you have the grains, or just pick from your own recipes?  The latter would seem far easier. 
 
MaltLicker said:
In my mind, that's the rub.  Some brewers catalog more by recipe, and others by style guidelines. 

Are you looking for options to brew any style for which you have the grains, or just pick from your own recipes?  The latter would seem far easier.

Not sure I am following you. Your saying it would be useful if you had roasted barley on hand, that Beersmith could tell you that you could make a stout?


My current situation is this. I have to track every recipe that I plan to brew in a separate spreadsheet as well as inventory. I have to explicitly designate inventory to each planned brew. If I make a random unplanned batch and use up the roasted barley, The rest of the ingredients for the "planned" stout are now floating. It would be nice to track floating ingredients to use them up before they get stale.

One way of doing this would be a recipe suggestion button. I click on a bunch of inventory ingredients that are getting old (and aren't designated for future batches), and Beersmith crunches it through my recipe database and then spits out recipes in order of maximum usage.

As a bonus it would be nice if it also listed recipes that come close as well on the list. Like: you have 5 oz of Citra, but the recipe calls for 6.
OR if you scaled this recipe down to 7 gallons instead of 10 you could make this.
 
Yea, the OP says recipes, but I was thinking styles.  Recipes on the system seems do-able to me, maybe in a certain folder?  You'd have to be consistent and always use the same grains, such as Weyermann Munich 10 and not the Briess or the generic, but that's do-able. 

I'm no coder, but it sounds like "take all current recipes, compile ingredients, compare to inventory, return recipes where all ingredients are greater than requirements." 

That's far easier than comparing to the vague and obtuse world of beer styles. 

Users would also have to be strict about what they entered in recipes.  For ex, I put "ingredients" such as Wort Chiller, Sanitize Spoon, etc., in mine to remind me to do actions, so I would have to keep those "items" in inventory to keep all recipes valid. 
 
grathan said:
My current situation is this. I have to track every recipe that I plan to brew in a separate spreadsheet as well as inventory. I have to explicitly designate inventory to each planned brew. If I make a random unplanned batch and use up the roasted barley, The rest of the ingredients for the "planned" stout are now floating. It would be nice to track floating ingredients to use them up before they get stale.

The Brew Log is the method I use to deal with the issues you seem to be using the spreadsheet for. In the recipes folder, each recipe is given a very old date (i.e. 1/1/11). The recipe folder is just a library of potential beers. As I decide to make the recipe, it is copied to the brew log folder. All of the recipes I have brewed are in there, too. So, it's one click to date sort and have all unbrewed recipes at the top of the list. A second click to reverse the sort and have my most recent brewing sessions at the top of the list.

Now, I can modify any recipe in the brew log file, to suit my needs for that particular brewing session. It's a simple task to add the upcoming recipes to the shopping cart and I know what to buy. On brew day, all I do is modify the date to be current.

If I don't brew a recipe, it stays sorted as an old date to be brewed later. I prevents me from forgetting why I have particular grains lying around.
 
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