# A homebrew recipe book and batch log — every batch recorded, and the recipes worth repeating Recipe No. 48, Hobbies and play. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/brew-log - For: a homebrewer forty batches into all-grain brewing, and a member of the local club - You bring: recipe sheets, a brew-day notebook with wort on its pages, your gravity readings, a few bottles left to taste, and the AI assistant you already use - You get: a recipe book of house beers and a batch log with the numbers and tasting notes for every brew, with the recipe book on a link for the club - Time: an evening for your assistant to file the old notebooks and an evening for you to check them, then ten minutes on brew day, bottling day and at each tasting - Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link A brewer's notebook is good on brew day and poor on every day after. The gravity readings are there, but the fermentation temperature was on a sticky note on the fridge, and the tasting that would have told you why batch 23 beat batch 20 happened at a club meeting and was never written down. This recipe keeps two documents. *Recipes* holds the beers you brew on purpose: a finding per recipe, with its target numbers and the story of how it got there. *Batches* holds every brew: a finding per batch with a table of what actually happened — grain bill, hops, yeast, original and final gravity, fermentation temperatures, dates — and tasting notes at two weeks and six. Whichever assistant you use — Claude, ChatGPT or a local model — does the transcribing, forty batches at a time, and later reads across them and lines up what changed between the good batch and the rest. You check the numbers and write the tasting notes. Your brewing software, if you use one, still does the sums on brew day. know.sh keeps the record of what happened after the numbers were planned. ## What you will use - **Your AI assistant**: Transcribes recipe sheets and notebook pages into recipe and batch findings with their tables, files each new brew day, and compares batches of the same beer, citing batch numbers. - **Shelf**: One shelf, *Garage brewery*, whose line describes your system, so that batch findings can stay about the batch. - **Research document**: *Recipes*, the book you would hand another brewer, and *Batches*, the lab notebook. - **Finding**: One per recipe and one per batch; off-flavours filed as *Problem*, recipe changes as *Decision*. - **The editor**: Where you check every transcribed number against the notebook, set types and **Key**, and write the tasting notes. - **Revisions**: A recipe's earlier versions, marked as yours or an assistant's, with **Restore** if a change made the beer worse. - **Public link**: A read-only link to *Recipes* for the club, with the recipes still in development left out. - **The iOS app**: Tasting notes typed on the phone, with the glass in the other hand. ## Method ### 1. Hand your assistant the notebooks Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page. Then give it your recipe sheets, the recipes your brewing software prints or saves, and photos of the brew-day notebook, a few pages at a time. Ask it to make a shelf, *Garage brewery*, described as "5.5 gallon (21 L) all-grain, electric kettle, fermentation chamber in the garage", with two documents. *Recipes* gets a finding per beer, titled with its name and style ("Porch Light — American pale ale"): target gravities, bitterness and colour, grain bill, hop schedule, yeast and fermentation plan. *Batches* gets a finding per brew, titled "Batch 44 — Porch Light, 14 June", with a two-column table of what happened and the headings *Brew day*, *Fermentation*, *Packaging* and *Tasting*. Ask it to link each batch to the recipe it brewed, and to leave any figure it cannot read as a question mark. ### 2. Check every number in the editor This is the step that makes the log worth having. Open each batch next to its notebook page, press **Edit**, and check the table line by line: a smudged 1.051 read as 1.015 will mislead every comparison after it. Fill in the question marks, file recipes as *Observation*, and mark the house beers **Key**. When a batch teaches you something, change the recipe and add a line at the bottom: "Changed 2 June: crystal 40 cut from 1 lb to 8 oz, after batch 42." The recipe's **Revisions** keep every earlier version, marked as yours or an assistant's. ### 3. File each new brew the same evening From now on, after each brew day, give your assistant the day's readings — a photo of the page or a few typed lines — and ask it to add the batch to *Batches* in the same shape: the grain bill as weighed, not as planned; hop additions with their times; the yeast and its pitch temperature; original gravity; fermentation temperatures as set and as read. Add final gravity readings and the bottling date and priming sugar the same way as they happen. Read the new finding before you close the laptop. An assistant filling a template will happily copy the recipe's planned numbers where your page says something else. ### 4. Taste twice and write it yourself Tasting notes are where a batch log earns its keep, and they are yours to write. Two weeks after packaging and again at six, pour one, open the batch in the iOS app (in TestFlight beta), press **Edit**, and write under *Tasting*: appearance, aroma, flavour, mouthfeel, and the one thing you would change. Use the same order every time, so batches compare line by line. When something is wrong — buttery, solventy, sour where it should not be — give it a finding of its own, filed as a *Problem*: "Diacetyl in batch 42". A problem with its own title is a result of its own in **Look up** (⌘K), and can be counted across batches. ### 5. Ask your assistant to compare batches Once a recipe has three or four batches behind it, ask your assistant to compare them in *Batches*: each batch's gravities, apparent attenuation, pitch and fermentation temperatures and days to final gravity in a table, then every difference in ingredients or process, set against the tasting notes that followed, with batch numbers cited for every point. It can also leave a proposed note beside a tasting line where two things changed at once. What comes back is a list of suspects, not a verdict. An assistant can do arithmetic on your readings and read your notes; it cannot taste the beer, and it can copy a number wrongly. Check anything you will act on, then write your conclusion as a *Decision* in the recipe. ### 6. Share the recipe book with the club When the club asks for your pale ale, press **Share** on *Recipes*. The link is read-only and shows the recipes without your notes or highlights; copy it when it appears, because the full link is shown only once. A recipe still in development can be left out from its own page and included when it is ready. *Batches* stays private: it is where the failures live, and the club only needs what worked. Set an expiry if you post the link on a public forum, and replace it if it travels further than you meant. When club members tell you how your recipe brewed on their system, leave yourself a **Note** on the recipe with what they found. ## Prompts to try Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read the document Batches on my Garage brewery shelf and compare every batch of Porch Light. Put each batch’s original and final gravity, apparent attenuation, pitch and fermentation temperatures and days to final gravity in a table, in a new finding called ‘Porch Light, batches compared’. Then list each difference in ingredients or process between batches and the tasting notes that followed it, citing batch numbers. Do not change the batch findings. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read the document Recipes on my Garage brewery shelf and add a ‘Contains’ line to each recipe, listing which of the nine major US allergens it includes (wheat in wheat malt, milk in lactose, and so on) and noting that barley malt contains gluten. Where an ingredient’s contents are unclear, write it with a question mark rather than guessing. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read Batches on my Garage brewery shelf and list every batch where the final gravity was recorded on only one date before bottling. Put the list in a new finding in Batches called ‘Bottled on a single reading’, so I can see whether those are the batches that overcarbonated. ## Variations - Cider, mead or wine: the same two documents work. Give each drink a shelf of its own, so each index stays readable. - Entering a club competition? Make a document per entry, with the style description summarised in your own words, and have your assistant type up each judge's score sheet as a finding from a photo. - Grow your own hops? Link each harvest in a [garden journal](/cookbook/garden-journal) to the batch it went into. - Baking with the spent grain? The [bread baker's log](/cookbook/bake-log) keeps those bakes, and each one can link back to its batch. ## Where it falls short - know.sh is not brewing software. It has no recipe calculator, no water chemistry and no gravity or bitterness formulas; your assistant can do arithmetic on numbers you give it, and can get it wrong. - Nothing reads your instruments. Hydrometers, digital gravity sensors and temperature controllers do not feed into know.sh; you or your assistant type the numbers in. - Club members read the recipe book; they cannot comment on it. Their questions and results reach you at the meeting or by email. - Transcribing photographed pages is where assistants slip, and smaller local models may not read images at all. Check every figure it files; Revisions shows each change an assistant made. ## A note on alcohol, sanitation and bottles Homebrewing is for adults. In the US it is legal in every state, within the federal limit of 100 gallons a year for a household with one adult and 200 for a household with two or more, and homebrew may not be sold. States, counties and other countries add rules of their own, including on bringing beer to meetings and competitions, so check yours. Never serve anyone under the legal drinking age, or anyone who is driving. Clean, then sanitise, everything that touches the wort after the boil. Bottle only when the final gravity has held steady across readings on different days; bottling early is how bottles burst. Use a priming calculator for the sugar, bottles made to hold pressure, and a closed box for the first weeks of conditioning. List what each recipe contains: wheat in wheat beers, milk in anything brewed with lactose, and gluten from barley in nearly every beer. AI assistants make mistakes; check any number you rely on against your own readings. Indexed under: Homebrewing, Batch logs, Tasting notes, Original gravity, Fermentation temperatures, Brewing clubs, Bottle conditioning.