Brew Day with BrewDocs

A batch has four tabs, and Brewing is the brew-day one. It opens with the session timer across the top and a strip of phase tabs under it: Prep first, then one tab per phase in the order the batch will run (1. Mash, 2. Boil, 3. Ferment), and Notes at the end. The phase you're on fills the rest of the screen.

Prep is worth a moment before you start heating anything. It holds the batch's Brewed on date and its Packaging (Keg or Bottle), and both belong to the batch rather than to any one phase, so they keep whatever you set regardless of how far the day gets. Notes, at the other end of the strip, is where the batch's SRM and any free-text notes live; SRM reads 0 until you measure one rather than starting blank, and a colour swatch appears beside it as soon as you enter a real number.

A phase's own tab lists everything assigned to it, grouped by kind: Equipment first, then Grains, Hops, Yeasts and Additives as the phase has them. Within a kind, anything carrying a boil time is listed longest-boil first, so a 60-minute addition sits above a 15-minute one, and reading the phase top to bottom is reading it in the order it happens. Grains and yeasts have no boil time to sort on, so they stay in the order you arranged while planning.

A phase you didn't give anything to shows up empty, and you can't tab to it. It can still become the current phase when you complete the one before it, and it can still be completed itself. There's simply nothing on it to check off.

Tapping a row's checkbox marks it done immediately, and it stays done: leave the batch, come back, reload the page, and the mash tun you sanitised is still ticked. There's no save step and no separate record of how something got checked off.

Ingredients carry a little more. Beside each one is its planned amount, and that field is yours to type over: enter what actually went into the kettle and BrewDocs records it as the actual while the plan keeps showing alongside it. That's the whole point of the pair: the recipe said 1.0oz, you weighed 1.15oz, and the batch remembers both. The same holds for a hop's boil time, and for an additive's weight whether or not that addition is boil-timed.

Nothing here locks as the day goes on. Ingredients and equipment stay editable however far through you are, including after every phase has been checked off, so a weight you fat-fingered at mash-in is still fixable while the beer is fermenting.

Every phase offers Gravity, Volume and Temperature groups under its ingredients. Add a reading, give it a name, set its value, and expand it if you want to set the date it was taken. Each one survives a reload like everything else on the batch. Removing a reading deletes it outright; it doesn't come back later.

The greyed-out numbers in an empty value field (12, 5.5, 68) are examples of the shape the field wants, not values. They vanish the moment you type, and an untouched field records nothing at all.

Some readings only appear where they mean something. Water Chemistry is offered on a mash and nowhere else; Pressure and a Keg date belong to a carbonation phase; a Bottle date to a conditioning one. The effect is that you can't log a keg pressure against a phase the beer has not reached yet. A yeast row has its own version of this: expand it and you get a Yeast Pitched date to set.

The control at the top left of the timer panel reads Start timer before the session has begun and whenever it is paused, and Pause timer while it is running. There's no separate resume: pausing and picking back up are the same intent, so one button answers both, which matters when you're reaching for it with one wet hand.

Beside the counter is a Global/Phase toggle. Global, the default, counts the whole brew session; Phase counts only the time inside the phase you're on, and it leaves out any time you had the timer paused since that phase began. Switching between them changes nothing but what you're looking at: the timer keeps running, or stays paused, exactly as it was.

The bar under the counter is the timeline, and the two scopes show different things on it deliberately. Global marks one start and one complete per phase that has begun, because every reading and hop addition from a whole brew day plotted at that scale would be unreadable. Phase shows that phase's own milestones, positioned relative to when the phase started (a hop logged 30 seconds in sits at 0:30), plus its completion marker once it's done.

The session survives a reload. Refresh mid-boil and the counter picks up where it should be, still running; if it was paused, it comes back paused at the same number.

Log opens a Quick action panel with three tabs, always in the same order: Ingredients, Reading, Equipment. One entry point rather than three means you don't have to decide what kind of thing you're recording before you've found the control. You tap the same button every time and pick the tab once you're there. The panel names the phase it's recording against, so there's no doubt where it's going.

The Ingredients tab has the item already chosen for you: the first thing on the phase you haven't checked off yet, following the same order the phase is listed in. Working down a boil is therefore one confirm per addition, and you only have to intervene when you want something out of order. The value field arrives pre-filled with that item's planned weight, so the number you'd otherwise be retyping at the kettle is already there. Type over it, or clear it, and whatever you submit is what gets recorded.

Equipment is the same idea with nothing to enter: name the piece of kit and confirm. Reading asks for the kind, an optional label, and the value. Leave the label blank and the reading keeps its kind's default name. If a tab has nothing left to offer on this phase, it reads as unavailable rather than taking a tap and doing nothing.

What comes out the other side is not a special kind of entry. Confirming a quick action ticks that item on the phase exactly as if you'd reached down and tapped its checkbox: same row, same tick, no separate record of which route you took.

The Complete button at the top right of the timer panel names the phase it will finish (Complete 1. Mash) and asks you to confirm before it does. The warning is meant literally: there's no way back from a completed phase, so it's worth a glance at the grid first. You don't have to have checked everything off; the button does not wait for a full phase.

Confirming moves you on to the phase that follows, because the next thing you want is almost never another look at what you just finished. Completing the last phase leaves you where you are, there being nothing after it.

It also stops the timer, if the timer was running: the control goes back to reading Start timer and the counter stops. The next phase does not begin timing on its own: you press Start yourself when you actually start work on it, rather than letting the clock run through however long it takes you to get there. If the timer was already paused, or you never started it, completing a phase leaves it exactly as it was.

Completing any phase, even the first one, locks the batch's Planning → Phases sub-tab for good. Adding, removing and reordering phases all stop being available, because the schedule you've been checking work off against would otherwise stop describing the day that actually happened. Ingredients and equipment stay editable; only the shape of the day is fixed.