One of my Brew Year Resolutions is to improve my note taking, and preferably use paper for taking those notes. Up until now I’ve been using BeerAlchemy for all my note taking and while it’s been working out fine, it’s had a few issues. From a users perspective, I have had the software completely wipe some fairly thorough notes on me by entering cmd+Z. It’s also difficult to quickly go over recipe notes because of how the software organizes things.

Another issue I have is that I’m leaving my laptop lying around in my kitchen while working with hot and often sticky liquids, which computers aren’t a huge fan of. A few brew days ago we had a near accident when some wort from our vorlauf splashed out of the mash tun onto various surfaces, include a laptop.

Another issue I’ve had is remembering what things need to happen during the brew day. To help I put together a checklist somewhat catered to my workflow during the brew day. It’s not exactly ordered, but it is roughly procedural in regards to what I do during the day.

I decided to take an hour or two to put together two sheets, a reusable (via clear plastic page protector) brew day checklist and a batch details sheet. The batch and brew day checklists don’t stand on their own though; I still use BeerAlchemy to do all my calculations (SRM, Mash, Sparge, etc.) and simply copy the information into the requisite locations.

These were put together using the Pages app for Mac OSX, so if you are a Mac user you can grab the pages files and modify them to suit your brewing needs. If you are on another platform, or don’t need to make changes you can download the PDF files instead.

Brew Day Checklist and Batch Details by Christopher Saunders are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.