Getting started

Beerwright runs at app.beerwright.com. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure before you start.

You do not have to sign in first

Open the app and it works. Your workspace lives in the browser, on the device you are using, and the whole calculation engine runs in the tab — so a guest session is a real session, not a demo. The sidebar says so: the sync indicator reads Guest — Saved on this device only.

Signing in adds one thing, and the sign-in screen is honest about it:

Signing in syncs your recipes across devices. You can keep using Beerwright without an account — everything stays on this device.

Signing in

Two ways, and neither involves a password. Beerwright stores none — there is no password field anywhere in the product.

A magic link. Type your address, press Email me a sign-in link, and open the link in the message. It expires in fifteen minutes and works once. The confirmation screen names the address back to you — “Check you@example.com” — so a typo is visible before you go looking in the wrong inbox, and the wording is deliberately non-committal about whether an account already exists:

If an account can be created or found for that address, a sign-in link is on its way. It expires in 15 minutes.

Google. If the deployment has Google sign-in configured, a Continue with Google button sits below the email field. If it does not, the button is not shown.

The link brings you back to the app signed in. The sidebar footer now carries your address and your plan, and the sync indicator moves from Connecting to Syncing to Synced.

If you had already made recipes as a guest

Signing in to an account that already has a synced workspace does not merge the two, and does not throw either away. The synced workspace is what you see; the recipes you made signed-out are still on the device, and signing out shows them again. The app tells you this when it happens.

Your first recipe

Press New recipe in the header, or Create your first recipe in the empty state, or open the command palette with ⌘K and choose New recipe. Any of the three does the same single thing, which means ⌘Z undoes the whole creation.

You land straight in the editor on a recipe called Untitled recipe, with:

• no style set, batch size 5 US gal, 60 minute boil
• the Generic 5 gal all-grain (cooler + kettle) equipment profile — 75 % mash efficiency, 70 % brewhouse
• a target carbonation of 2.4 volumes
• one mash step, Saccharification, 66 °C for 60 minutes
• one fermentation step, Primary, 20 °C for 14 days
• empty ingredient lists

Efficiency belongs to the equipment profile, not to the recipe, which is why changing rigs changes the numbers on every recipe you brew on it.

There is no product tour and no coach marks. The empty state points at the one thing worth knowing: press A in the editor to search the catalog.

A tour of the editor

The editor is a single scrolling column of panels with a sticky vitals rail down the right — not tabs. On a phone the rail becomes a bar docked to the bottom that expands when you tap it.

The header

The recipe name is an inline field: type, press Enter to commit or Escape to revert. Beside it sit Style, Batch, Boil and Equipment, then Scale and Brew. The overflow menu holds the things you do to a recipe rather than in it: shopping list, print brew sheet, version history, share, duplicate, export as BeerJSON, delete.

The panels

In order: Fermentables, Hops, Yeast, Misc, then Mash schedule and Fermentation schedule side by side, then Water & mash pH, Packaging and Notes. Every one of them recalculates locally on every edit, including the salt solver and the mash-pH model — nothing waits on a server.

The vitals rail

Five style-range bars — OG, FG, IBU, SRM (or EBC, if that is your unit) and ABV — sit against the BJCP range for the style you picked, so “in style” is something you can see rather than something you look up. Below them: the colour swatch with its MCU and the model that produced it, a mash pH strip, then BU:GU, Calories, CO₂ and Pre-boil, then the volume waterfall from strike water to packaged beer.

Every headline number has an explain popover behind it. It shows how that number was calculated, and ends with a link to ask the assistant about it. If a figure ever looks wrong, that popover is the first place to go — it names the formula that produced it, and the calculator reference explains that formula in full.

The assistant

⌘J opens the assistant drawer. It reads your real workspace and runs the real engine, and it never edits anything directly. A request comes back as a proposal card: a summary, the reasoning, a checkbox per individual change, and a before-and-after diff of the vitals coloured against the style range. You press Accept all — or tick a subset and press Accept 3 — or Reject.

Accepting dispatches one batch, so ⌘Z undoes the entire proposal.

If the recipe changed after the proposal was drafted, the card says so and offers to re-check rather than quietly applying stale advice.

Getting around

⌘K opens the command palette: your recipes by name, style or tag, the actions (new recipe, undo, redo, theme, units) and every page in the app.

⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo across the whole workspace, not just the field you are in. The history is deep but it does not survive a reload — delete confirmations say so.

Saving

There is no Save button, and no “Saved” label, because there is nothing to wait for. Edits are written to the browser’s own storage continuously, and if you are signed in they are also queued and pushed to your account. The sidebar’s sync indicator is the only status there is, and what it says when the connection drops is worth knowing before it happens.

Where to go next

• Importing recipes — bring a library across from another tool.
• Water chemistry — the panel that does the most work per click.
• Calculator reference — what every number on the rail means.