Journal

Journal is for the ferments that do not fit a recipe: a mead, a cider, a hot sauce, a jar of kimchi, or a beer you want to tell the story of. A journal is a page you build up as you go, one block at a time, and it stands on its own or tells the story of as many of your batches and blending sessions as belong in it. When you want to, you can share it as a page that keeps up with you.

Starting one

Press New journal, give it a name, and you have an empty page. Nothing on it assumes there is alcohol involved, so the same page works for a must and for a brine. Journals are listed by last update, and the search box looks through names, notes and measurement labels.

The free plan includes five journals; the paid plans have no cap. At the limit a new journal is not saved, and the app says so and suggests deleting one you no longer need or moving up.

Blocks

Every block carries a date, which is when the thing happened rather than when you typed it, so you can write up Tuesday’s reading on Friday and the record stays right. Blocks sit in the order you put them; Sort by date puts them in order of their dates if you would rather.

Note is prose. Write as much or as little as you like. Bold, lists, headings and links are a button away, or type / on a new line to pick one from a menu.
Photo is a picture from your phone or your files. We shrink it before it leaves your device, which also removes the location your phone stamped on it, so a shared page never says where you live.
File is a document you already have: a water report, a grain invoice, a spreadsheet of readings. See below for what kinds and how big.
Measurement is a number with a label: a gravity, a pH, a titratable acidity in g/L, a temperature, a mass, a volume or a percentage. The label says what was measured, so “Brine, 3.5 %” and “Must, 1.110” are the same kind of block.
Recipe, Fermentation chart and Blend each name a batch or a blending session of yours; see below.
Calculators keep their inputs on the page and work the answer out from them: ABV from two gravities, a hydrometer reading corrected for the sample’s temperature, the priming sugar for a volume at a target carbonation, and the water and sugar that take a jar of high-proof macerate to the strength and sweetness you want. The answer is the same one the rest of the app would give, because it comes from the same code, and it updates when you change an input.

Each block can be moved up or down and removed. Removing a photo or a file asks first, because the bytes go with it and undo cannot bring them back.

Files on a page

Some of what a ferment leaves behind is a document somebody else wrote: a lab’s water report, a maltster’s spec sheet, a receipt for the grain, a spreadsheet from a device we do not read. Add a File block and pick it, and it sits on the page with its name, what kind of file it is and how big, and a caption if you want one.

We keep PDFs, CSV files, plain text, Markdown, JSON and the same three photo formats, up to 20 MB each. Anything else we turn away and say so, because a journal can be shared and a file a browser would run is not something to hand a stranger. For the same reason nothing is ever shown inside the page: a file is always a download, yours and a reader’s alike.

Files count towards the same storage your photos do, and towards the same sixty things with bytes on them that one page holds. Removing a file block deletes the file as well, so we ask first.

Batches and blends on a page

Three kinds of block are about something else you keep in Beerwright. Add a Recipe block and it asks which batch it is about, and shows that batch’s recipe as it was brewed. Add a Fermentation chart and it draws that batch’s device readings, with your gravity measurements as points on the curve and your notes and photos marked along it. Add a Blend and it shows a blending session: the beers that went in with their volumes and final gravities, and what came out — the total, the strength, and what it will carbonate to. It also says which reading that strength rests on: the newest gravity you floated in the blend itself, with the day you took it, or a line saying the figures come from the beers that went in when you have taken none.

That last part is worth knowing before you write a gravity onto the page. A Measurement block is your own note about a sample; it does not feed the blend, and the blend’s ABV follows the readings on the blend’s own page. If you want the summary above to move, record the reading there — which is also where the list of them lives, so you can watch a gueuze dry out over a winter.

We only ask once. The next block you add starts on the batch or the session the page most recently referred to, so a journal about one beer never has to answer the question twice. A journal you started from a batch or a blend page opens with the right block already on it.

None of it is copied onto the page. Correct a gravity on the batch, or top a beer up in the blend, and the journal shows you the new number the next time you look. A block whose batch or blend you have since deleted says so, and keeps saying so until you remove the block, because it is the last record that this page was ever about it.

A page can hold as many of these as you like, each naming its own batch or session, and each says which above its content. The name is the way there: press it and the batch or the blending session opens. That is what makes a barrel a page: filled by three brews over a year, blended twice, and written up in one place. A beer you have brewed three times is the same story told once, with three recipes and three charts down the page, instead of three journals with nothing joining them.

A journal can also carry a device of its own. In Settings, under Readings go to, a device can be pointed at a journal instead of a batch, which is how a mead with no batch behind it gets a chart. A Fermentation chart block that names no batch draws that series. Everything else about devices is unchanged.

Making an amaro

Beerwright does not know what a maceration is. There is no ingredient list for botanicals and no model of what wormwood gives up in a week. What a journal gives you is somewhere to keep the record, and one calculator for the part of it that is arithmetic.

It goes like this. Steep your botanicals in high-proof spirit, and put what went in and when into Note blocks, with a Measurement block for each weight or date you want to be able to find again. When the maceration is done, strain it and measure what you are holding: how many liters, and how strong. Then add a Proof and sweeten block, give it those two numbers and the strength and sweetness you are aiming at, and it answers with the water and the sugar together.

Together is the point. Sugar dilutes the alcohol a second time, because dissolved sugar takes up room of its own, so proofing down first and sweetening afterwards leaves you short of both targets with nothing on the page to say why. A liter at 60 % taken to 30 % and then sweetened to 150 g/L lands nearer 27 % and 137 g/L. One block does both sums at once and comes out where you asked it to.

If your sugar is already a syrup, set the sweetener to Syrup and tell us how strong it is in °Bx, which is what a refractometer reads off it. The syrup brings water of its own, so there is less of it to add from the tap.

One caution, which the block repeats under its figures: spirit and water pull together a little when they mix, so the volume we work out runs slightly high. Add the water a shade short of what we say, and top up to volume by measuring.

Feedback and labels

A journal collects tasting sheets the way a batch and a blend do, whatever is fermenting in it. Feedback in the journal’s header opens a page of its own, where every sheet somebody sent about it lands, and the button carries a count when some have arrived that you have not read yet.

Print labels, beside it, gives you a sheet of thirty bottle labels, and Print a card on the Feedback page gives you tasting cards to tie to the bottles instead. The form behind the code leaves out everything that only makes sense for beer. See tasting feedback for the cards, the labels and the forms.