So, I’m a bit of a nerd and I’m into making Excel do cool things for me. I also like schedules that let me plan things out and get excited about what’s to come.
I have worked out an Excel workbook that houses all of my brewing information. It keeps my schedule, recipes, notes, pictures, and a carbonation chart for kegging.
A few pics are below.
The meat of the file is in the schedule. You can enter holidays where you would want a specific year and the schedule lets you work backwards from there to tell you when you need to gather the materials. The red column is today’s date. The green rows are rows for gathering ingredients and boiling (don’t tie up your equipment). Dark blue rows are for fermenting. They’re why I made the spreadsheet, so that I wouldn’t need more carboys than I have (you can easily look down a column and if you have more dark blue cells than you have carboys, you’re in trouble). Light blue is for kegging. Seam deal as the dark blue but for kegging. You have to do some tweaking for schedules as beers don’t always follow a strict schedule but it definitely helps plan.
There are some other helpful conditions in there but I’ll leave it here for now. With this schedule, I’ll have plenty of time to brew 13, 5 gallon batches by the end of 2012. It also makes sure I don’t have my Oktoberfest be ready in November like I did this last year.
I’m new to brewing so if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Also, I wouldn’t consider this easy to use but if you want a copy, I’d be happy to share it.
