Basic Brew Day Spreadsheets

[thomer]

New to the forum. Good to meet you all.

I have been brewing for about 6 months and am still working with Brewers Best and Craft-a-Brew kits to 'learn the trade'. My first 6-8 batches were perfect and could not wish for a better quality at this early stage and from kits. However recently I have had a couple of issues with bad beer. I had a seal that wasn't put on a catalyst correctly, and a bottling 'wand' that had a bad gasket and was leaking over my hand while filling. So I suspect these were the issue with contamination. So I want to note everything I do from start to finish so I can start tracking down where some of the issues are/have been. Is there a spreadsheet available that would allow me to do that. I am looking for basic information I can fill in such as:-

Beer Name
Brew Date
Type of Brew
Steeping Grain Temp
Boil Time
Type of Fermenter
Bottling Method
Beer Taste (good/bad)
Any Issues
etc etc etc

I can of course produce one, but it would save a little time if I have a template I can edit. I have seen many spreadsheets around for recipes, but I am not quite there yet until I hone down where some of these errors are coming from.

Thanks for reading.

 

[balrog]

BrewersFriend has brew day sheets you can print.

 

[thomer]

Thanks for the response. Those are just checklists rather than a 'diary' of what happened during the whole brewing process. I will keep looking/start creating my own. Thanks again.

 

[balrog]

Everyone will keep different things, different ways. Some like journals. I went the spreadsheet route but now have sheets with multiple linked tabs, everything from recipe, to process, to measurements of time temp pH cooling etc. It has become a bit large and I really should have gone database from the get go but I just didn't want to do all the UI up front and here I am.

I use the following of my own on brew day

BUt the spreadsheet gets all that (snapped in two images):

 

[thomer]

Thanks for those spreadsheets they are great. It gives me something to aspire to

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

I'm looking for the same, I have a sheet to create the recipes but need a stats sheet

 

[Jamafrica brewer]

You can buy pretty neat brew diaries on Amazon
Also if you just Google brewing spreadsheets, you'll be surprised what you can get. I did this a couple weeks ago and got a surprising amount of content.

 

[thomer]

Funnily enough my wife was doing some Googling and found the same thing yesterday. I had started my own by that time, so now I'm 'acquiring' ideas from those and incorporating them into my own

 

[MaxStout]

I made up one in Word to print out, with tables to fill in the blanks as I go. Gear used, ingredients, measurements, comments, etc. Prints out 2-sided--front is brew day info, back for fermentation and packaging.

 

[thomer]

Good idea about using both sides. Thanks.

 

[Brooothru]

You can buy pretty neat brew diaries on Amazon
Also if you just Google brewing spreadsheets, you'll be surprised what you can get. I did this a couple weeks ago and got a surprising amount of content.

Me too. AFTER wasting a crap ton of time making my own. The cornerstone of my paperwork is BeerSmith printout of my recipe and brew sheet, but I also built an Excel spreadsheet that tracks volume, gravity, temperatures, pH, time, etc., throughout the process from strikewater to packaging.

The benefit of DIY is that it was built specifically for my gear and gives reliably accurate and repeatable data for designing future brew sessions. The downside is that it took a lot of time and numerous brew sessions to fine tune it.