I love this forum!!

This is such a wealth of knowledge! Thanks for sparking my interest after several years out of the game. :rockin:

I like good beer and the idea of creating a brew personal to you is so captivation. I think that is why we all love it. I am working on some 1 gallon batches to gain knowledge through many trials. I am still in college and it is cheaper this way also.

Maybe because I am a senior now in engineering at my school, but I have just been blown away by the DIY section. It makes me feel like a kid day dreaming up new ideas for brewing, haha. I can't wait to get to the point where I am creating and contributing massive ideas and projects.

Seeing as how I am just starting out again, and brewing partial mash batches of 1 gallon going into the fermenter, I was curious about others record keeping practices. I have a big 200pg bound notebook I hope to fill with notes and recipes I have made in one gallon batches. Anyone have tips on record keeping and how to make your notes as useful as possible for yourself down the road?

Welcome

You're right. This forum is an abundance of knowledge with experienced brewers willing to share their experience.

Cheers

Oh, and I use the pdf from radicalbrewing.com for notes. It's pre-printed with space for notes and such

Keebaw said:

I was curious about others record keeping practices. I have a big 200pg bound notebook I hope to fill with notes and recipes I have made in one gallon batches. Anyone have tips on record keeping and how to make your notes as useful as possible for yourself down the road?

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I used to keep a spiral notebook of notes. Over a period of years, it became so ratty, then literally fell apart. Those notes are completely gone.

I keep all my notes in Beersmith now.

Thanks for the link to the log sheet. For some reason I really like handwriting it into a bound notebook. But referencing that layout will give me ideas for organization.

I am just curious, what type of information has anyone found really useful from there logs? Other then digging out an old recipe. What was a major insight you gained. I would think smash batches would be really helpful and I plan on doing some in the future.

I am trying to get comfortable with my brewing process, learn and get some insights about note keeping so in the future I can better learn from what I have done.

Break out the log sheet to reference a particular beer. Try to taste the ingredients.

If there's an off-flavor, all of the clues *should* be in your notes. Water used, grist, yeast, temp, hops, length of ferment, mistakes during brew process.....

Cheers!

Yeah, thats a good idea. I will leave a space for comments at tasting.

I have some photography knowledge and was thinking about building a light box that would standardize the lighting and dimensions of a photograph on a poured glass. Then keep the same camera settings and photo the finished product of each brew. That could give a visual reference if you were going for a certain color or head characteristic. You could then check your notes to see what you did to get it!

Keebaw said:

Yeah, thats a good idea. I will leave a space for comments at tasting.

I have some photography knowledge and was thinking about building a light box that would standardize the lighting and dimensions of a photograph on a poured glass. Then keep the same camera settings and photo the finished product of each brew. That could give a visual reference if you were going for a certain color or head characteristic. You could then check your notes to see what you did to get it!

Click to expand...

That's a great idea. What type of light would you go with? If that changed it's characteristics over time, lot, or vendor the image would change.

I have an external flash unit and have built light boxes before out of foam core. The idea of the light box is to help diffuse the light evenly on a subject. It would probably be a good idea to use a photography flash since the white balance of that light source should be more consistent then incandescent bulbs.

Different cameras and the display you view them on will reproduce the results differently and not true to life. That is why I think to make taking photos have more value, the lighting and settings at the time of photo should be as close as possible each time. Then you could look at histograms and color curves of the image to see how they change between batches.

I will think about this some more and post my methods if I get something set up.