The ways I've pictured this have all seemed visually confusing. Of course there's always room for elegant design!just-cj wrote:I may have mentioned it before, but I think having the recipe and the actual brewday data in the same file is a lot more convenient. Then have a "compare" menu item -- click on that and the differences between how you designed the recipe and how it actually came out on brew day would be highlighted. Even have it so that you can brew the same recipe several times, with each of the brewdays recorded in the same file. To me, this is much more convenient than having two separate files, one with my recipe and one with my brewday.
But... another possibility would be to incorporate both ideas. I'd like my brewday-recipe file to be reletively clean so that I can find the info I need easily. The primary-recipe file, however, once I've written the recipe, could get cluttered with all the cumulative info without being much of a bother.
I think it would be great to have the primary-recipe link to all the brewday-recipes and acquire all the useful data as a history file. It would be really useful to be able to see that every time I make a recipe I hit the OG or that each time I repeat it my efficiency drops, indicating I have a problem with my system. Or to see a chart of FG's with indications of which yeast had been used. The list of important data points seems reasonably short. Displaying all the slight ingredient changes between multiple sessions could get a bit confusing, though.
I wouldn't mind having a feature like this that was time dependent but recipe independent for a limited set of brewery parameters like efficiency, attenuation, and boil-off. This would allow a graphic display of brewery parameters over time to monitor how well the brewery's running, how mash temperature affects FG, or how a given yeast typically attenuates in your hands. This seems more ambitious.