Welcome to BeerSmith.
Each recipe in BeerSmith is essentially a separate archive. To handle brewing a recipe versus a recipe in your library, BeerSmith has a 'brew log' function. There is an icon in your toolbar ribbon when you are looking at the recipe folder called 'copy to log'. Highlighting a recipe and clicking on 'copy to log' will create a brew log folder and place a copy of your recipe inside it. You can then use that copy to make any changes you want, set the brew date, record brew day data (highly recommended). This preserves the original recipe in your main recipe folder(s) and you can follow a recipe and changes made to it using the recipe name, version number if you choose to use it, and brew date.
You can even set the brew calendar within the program to only show those recipes which are located in the brew log folder so that your calendar does not get clogged up with standard recipes. If you search the forum for 'brew log' you will find several posts where people describe how they use this function effectively for themselves.
