September 2026

What changed in September, in the order a brewer would have met it. Not every commit; the things you would notice.

In the editor

• Replace with… A malt or a hop swaps in place from the row’s menu: the amount, the timing and the note stay, the ingredient changes, and one undo puts it back. A hop’s substitutes in its specs are one click to swap. The assistant does the same trick when you ask it to.

• Hops admit their age. Adjust for age on a hop row applies the Garetz storage model and writes the faded alpha onto the row.

• Hop products. CO₂ extract, aroma extract, cryo and the pre-isomerised extract that bitters without a boil, each in its own form so an extract can never be counted as a pellet.

• Keg hops. A hop row can go in the keg now: no bitterness, and no contact time to invent, because the beer sits on it until the keg is empty. The calendar puts it on package day and the brew sheet prints it under Packaging, where you weigh it out. Terpene products moved to Misc, where a dose in milliliters makes sense — search for one under Hops and it still turns up, saying where the row will land before it goes there.

• Checks before the kettle. A card in the vitals rail says when a vital is outside the style, when the pitch is short, and what would fix it. Out of style is a note, not a warning.

• Dry yeast is sold by the gram, so it is judged by the gram: the pitch check compares a dry pitch to the maker’s grams per hectoliter, and over-pitching is only a fault when a whole sachet could come out.

• Seven more ways to ferment, and a spunding valve on the last step finally counts toward the priming dose.

• The decoction planner speaks gallons to brewers who think in them.

• The editor writes its shortcuts down, in whichever keys your keyboard has.

• Notes format themselves. A journal note is a page now, not a box of markdown: lists number themselves, bold looks bold, and / on a new line offers a heading, a list or a quote. What we store did not change, so a note written last week reads exactly as it did.

• Provisional styles. The BJCP X series, five styles, in the picker and the styles tab, sorted after category 34 and marked as unsettled.

• A grain bill can be aimed at a gravity. Under By % the summary now carries the OG you want beside the mass it costs: type one and the bill resizes to reach it, keeping every percentage. It scales down from an overshoot as readily as up, starts from your style’s own band, and one undo takes back the target and the weights together. A base malt added from the picker is sized to the same number.

• And at a color. The same summary carries the color you are aiming at. Type one and the crystal and roasted malts are sized to reach it, keeping their ratio to each other, with the base malts giving or taking the difference. Set a target OG as well and the bill resizes to hold the gravity while the color moves. We say so rather than guess when there is no color malt to size, or when the color would take more than half the grist.

• Archive a recipe. Anything you are done with leaves the list from its row menu or from the recipe’s own ⋯ menu, and comes back from the Archived chip above the list — which carries a count, and turns the list into your archive when pressed. Nothing is deleted and nothing else changes: share links, gallery listings and exports all keep working. It does not free a slot on the free plan’s ten, and the cap message now says so.

• Actions on a selection. Tick some rows and Actions will tag, archive or delete all of them at once — one step, so one undo takes the whole lot back. Tags are added to what each recipe already has, and Clear selection lets go of the ticks.

• Sorting by style heads each style. Guideline order already put 21A beside 21B; now it says so, with a sticky label per style and the unplaceable ones gathered at the end.

• A whirlpool says how hot it was, and for how long. A hop added at flameout or in the whirlpool now takes the temperature the kettle read when the stand began and the temperature it read when the stand ended, so a steep that falls from 80 °C to 68 °C over twenty minutes is written as what it was rather than as a single number. The bitterness explanation shows what each stand was worth on its own, in boil minutes and in IBU, so you can see where the number came from and change the part you disagree with. A stand written in two steps survives an export and comes back the same.

• A hop can no longer make a beer less bitter. The Garetz utilization curve we use goes negative below about nine minutes, which is an artefact of the fit rather than anything that happens in a kettle, and we were passing it straight through: a whirlpool or a late-boil addition could subtract bitterness from the total. It is floored at zero now. If you keep recipes with short additions, their IBU has gone up, and the new figure is the right one. One worked example in our own documentation moved from 13.6 to 20.2.

• A duplicate can be named when you make it. Duplicate asks what the copy should be called and offers the old name with “(copy)” after it, so a shelf of variants does not have to be renamed afterwards.

Devices and support

• Any device that speaks the common tongue. A controller already posting to Brewfather can post to us with the same body; paste a device URL over theirs.
• The feature-request board: public, votable, and one tab from your support thread. The board writes back.
• The board is in sections. Planned at the top, Open under it, and Shipped and Declined folded shut at the bottom — so what we have decided is out of the way of what we have not, and a shipped request no longer holds the top row on the strength of the votes that shipped it. Search still looks inside the folded sections and opens them.

The catalog

• Yeast. Every strain the five liquid houses sell, read off their own sheets; Jasper Yeast’s 105; RVA’s 34; the CellarScience range; the whole Gladfield range; Imperial’s A62; and then Lalvin, Berkeley Yeast, WHC Lab, AEB and Red Star, with Fermentis’ SafCider and SafSour lines. Then Brewing Science Institute’s 130 and Inland Island’s 95, each off the lab’s own product pages, and the British shelf: CrossMyLoof’s 27 dry strains, Brewlab’s twelve regional slants, and Muntons with the Gervin range. The yeast collection passed a thousand.
• Malt. Pauls Malt in full, The Swaen’s 47, Cork, Great Western, Briess by the can, eight craft malthouses, the European sweep, sixty-one fermentables on the sugar shelf, and Viking in depth. Sinamar stopped pretending to be a malt.
• Hops. Twenty off the shelf at Yakima Valley, Brewer’s Gold settled, Pekko and Cryo Pop, two charity blends, and the rule that only ever applied to varieties.
• Misc. Barrel char, three more citrus peels, licorice and the pepper that is not one.
• Rigs. Twenty-one more equipment profiles, from the Braumeister to a kitchen pot, and then the Brewer’s Edge Mash & Boil in both sizes, with and without the recirculating pump.

The assistant

• Conversations can be started over. A button in the drawer’s header deletes what you and the assistant said about a beer, after asking, and leaves anything you accepted in the recipe.
• Answers can be stopped, retried and copied. Stop keeps what arrived on screen and withdraws the question from the assistant’s memory. An answer that fails on our side gives the message back and offers Try again. Each answer has a copy button.
• Long conversations stay quick. The assistant remembers a thread from its most recent stretch; everything you said stays on screen.

On a batch

• The starter is sized for the jar you’re actually pitching. Tell a batch which jar you’re using, before brew day, and we size its starter from that jar’s age and generation rather than from a fresh pack of the strain. The batch keeps what you save, the calendar builds it two days before you brew, and the recipe’s own starter stays put for the next brew. Choosing the jar takes it off your shelf there and then; pitching is its own press on brew day.
• Dates can be typed. The date on a journal block and on a tasting used to fight you: backspace did nothing, and a half-typed year raised an error. Both now wait until you have finished.
• Picking a date on a desktop now opens our own calendar instead of the browser’s, so it looks like the rest of the app. On a phone the native picker stays, because it is the better one there.
• Starters on your day. Settings → Calendar sets how many days ahead of brew day the starter lands on your calendar, one to five, and the reminder follows it.
• Bottle labels. Print labels on a batch opens a sketch of an Avery 5520 sheet: pick a beer, tap the labels it goes on, add another beer if you are sharing the sheet, and print at 100% with no margins. Each label carries the name, the style, the ABV and the same code the tasting card does, so a sheet sent back from a bottle lands on the batch either way. Nothing is remembered between sheets, because the part-used one in your drawer is the only record worth trusting. A beer with an accent in its name keeps its letters: a label falls back to the plain letter rather than printing a question mark, so Kölsch prints as Kolsch and never as K?lsch.
• Over your gravity on brew day, and what the water would cost. When the reading you enter into the fermenter is above the OG you were aiming at, a line underneath says how much water would bring it back down and what your volume becomes if you add it. It appears on brew day and on the batch page, only when you are actually over, and it speaks whichever unit you read gravity in.

The journal

• A journal. Somewhere to write down a beer that is not a recipe and not a batch: a barrel you are filling over a year, a house culture you keep feeding, a week of tasting notes. A journal is a stack of pages, each page a stack of blocks, and a block can be a note, a photo, a measurement, a date or a calculation.
• Tags, and links to the work. A journal takes tags the way a recipe does, out of the same vocabulary, so a word you used on a recipe means the same word here. A block can point at a batch or at a blend, which is how one journal tells the story of a beer across several brews rather than one.
• A blend can be made of blends. A component of a blend can itself be a blend, which is what a solera is: this year’s draw goes back into a vessel that already holds every year before it. The gravity, the alcohol and the volume carry up through however many layers you build. A blend also keeps every hydrometer reading rather than only the last one, and an addition can say the day it went in.
• Proof and sweeten, in one sum. For anyone making an amaro or a liqueur: tell the block what is in the jar, the strength you want and how sweet you want it, and it answers with the water, the sugar or the syrup, and what you will actually end up with. It is one calculation rather than two because the two move each other. Dissolved sugar takes up room, so sweetening pushes the strength back down a second time, and a liter of 60% proofed to 30% and then sweetened to 150 g/L really lands at 27.4% unless somebody counts it. The block says plainly what it does not model: spirit and water pull together slightly when mixed, so add the water a shade short and top to volume by measuring.

Coming from another app

• BeerSmith files, both kinds. A .bsmx export drops onto the import page beside BeerXML and BeerJSON, and we read the recipe, the grain bill, the hops with their form and use, the yeast, the mash steps and the equipment out of it. A file BeerSmith wrote is recognized by what is inside it rather than by its extension.
• A page for people arriving from Brewfather, in the documentation, saying what carries across, what we call things instead, and what we do not do.