Designer

Design recipes step by step with the Brewfather Recipe Designer's ingredient and calculation tools.

The recipe designer - simple and easy to follow layout

The recipe designer is the heart of your brewing creativity. This is where you design your recipes or modify recipes you have imported.

The workflow has been carefully designed to take you step by step through creating your personalised brew. Starting by naming your recipe and choosing the style and your brewing equipment through choosing your ingredients, brewing and fermentation profiles.

As you change details and ingredients, your batch details, such as color, predicted gravities and ABV, change in real-time, allowing you to fine-tune each recipe to your target values.

Recipe Details

Enter recipe details

You input your recipe details in this section and choose the brew type.

• Click on the text area under name and author to enter your details.

• Click on the Type drop-down to choose the type of recipe (All Grain, Partial Mash or Extract)

• Recipe Image — To the left of the recipe name, the beer color icon displays your recipe's estimated color. Click on it to upload a custom photo or image for your recipe. If an image has already been added, a thumbnail is shown instead, and clicking it lets you change or remove the image.

• Folder Selector — Next to the Author field, you can assign the recipe to a folder for organization. See Recipe Folders for details.

• Version Selector — When the recipe has been saved, a version selector appears in the recipe details area (on smaller screens) or in the toolbar (on larger screens), showing the current version number and providing access to version history. See Recipe Versioning for details.

Below the main recipe details and ingredient sections, you will find several additional fields:

• Tags — A tag input field where you can add tags to organize and search your recipes. Tags are separated by comma or period. As you type, an autocomplete dropdown suggests existing tags. Tags are searchable from the recipes list page.

• Notes — A large text area (up to 10,000 characters) for recording special notes about your recipe, such as brew day observations, recipe history, or anything else you want to remember.

• Teaser Text — A short description field for your recipe. This text is displayed when the recipe is shared publicly, giving viewers a brief summary of what the recipe is about.

Next comes setting your equipment profile. This affects the predicted values based on batch size, efficiency and other factors from your equipment profile.

Equipment details

• Click on the 'Scale' button to scale the recipe to whatever batch size you would like

• Click the 'Change Equipment Profile' button to change your brewing equipment. Changing the equipment profile may ask you if you want to scale the recipe to match the new equipment profile.

• Click on the 'Edit Equipment Profile' button to edit your current equipment profile Any edits made will mean Brewfather will prompt you to scale the recipe to ensure that the predicted outcome will remain the same.

• Click on the 'Batch Size' button to change the batch size without scaling.

• Click on the 'Boil Time' button to set the length of the boil

The Style section provides the recipe designer with the guideline ranges to provide meaningful values for the sliders. The shaded areas represent the range of the values provided by the style. The style can be picked from multiple supported style guidelines, including BJCP, etc.

The Style section

Click on the 'Change Style' button to choose your style from the list of available styles.

Ingredients

The main body of the designer screen is devoted to your ingredient entry areas.

The fermentables section of your recipe

Fermentables

This is the area where you choose your fermentables. This can include items you have already added to your inventory or a wide range of ingredients in the software. It includes a calculated Pre-Boil, Original Gravity and a Colour value at the bottom which updates in real time as you adjust your grain bill.

The section header displays the total weight of all fermentables in the recipe next to the section title (for example, "Fermentables (5.2 kg)"). Each fermentable in the list shows its weight, name, supplier, type (Grain, Sugar, Dry Extract, Liquid Extract, Adjunct), grain color, percentage of the total grain bill, and the use type (Mash, Steep, or Boil) along with the time for boil additions. When Inventory Stock is enabled in Settings, a stock status indicator appears next to each fermentable showing whether it is in stock (see Inventory Integration below).

• To add a fermentable to your recipe click the add button to bring up the 'Add Fermentable' dialog box.

  

  The Add Fermentable Dialog

  • Type in the search bar at the top to find a named brand of malt or a generic type of malt from your inventory or the built-in database of fermentables.

  • If the fermentable you want is not in the database or your inventory you can enter it directly from this dialog box and provide the relevant information about it. Find more information about adding custom fermentables here.

  • If you wish to follow a recipe that lists the malts as percentages of the total you can use the add button to add 1kg/lb of each malt then click the Percentage button This will open a dialog box allowing you to set the percentages of each of the fermentable ingredients. Please note that you can go above or below 100% but Brewfather will scale the ingredients to end up with 100% and this may not be scaled the way you want it so keep an eye on the total percentage at the top of the dialog box.

  • You can also choose to scale the recipe up or down to a specific Original Gravity by clicking on the OG button This will scale all your ingredients linearly to reach the chosen OG.

Hops

Much like the fermentables this allows you to enter hops from your inventory or from a range of hops already included in the software. This includes a Total IBU, BU/GU (Bitterness Units/Gravity Units) ratio and a RBR value (Relative Bitterness Ratio) which updates in real time with each change you make.

The Hops section

• Click the 'Add' button to add hops from your Inventory or the database. This brings up a dialog that works in the same way as the Fermentables dialog and allows you to either search using the search box at the top or enter in custom details.

• The IBU button allows you to set the IBU value that you want and Brewfather scales the 60-minute addition to match the IBU's set.

• Hop Summary toggle — Click the list icon button in the section header to switch between the individual hop list view and a summary view. The summary view groups hop additions by hop variety, showing the combined total amount, alpha acid percentage, and total IBU contribution for each variety. This is useful for getting a quick overview when a recipe has many hop additions. The toggle is disabled when the recipe has fewer than two hop additions.

The section header displays the total hop weight next to the title (for example, "Hops (120 g)"). Each individual hop entry shows its weight, a rate per volume (g/L or oz/gal), name, alpha acid percentage, hop type (Pellet, Whole, Cryo, or CO2 Extract), IBU contribution, use type (Boil, Mash, First Wort, Aroma/Hopstand, or Dry Hop), and time. For Dry Hop additions, the time is shown in days. When Inventory Stock is enabled in Settings, a stock status indicator appears next to each hop entry.

Hopstand — Hops with the "Aroma" use type are treated as hopstand additions. These are displayed with a "hopstand" label and, if a hopstand temperature is set, the temperature is shown alongside (for example, "hopstand @ 80 C"). The summary area at the bottom of the hops section shows the total hopstand time in minutes and the hopstand temperature when applicable.

Dry Hop and Aroma Hop Rates — Below the hop list, Brewfather displays the dry hop rate and aroma hop rate in g/L (or oz/gal). These rates are calculated based on the fermenter volume from your equipment profile. The values are color-coded: green when within the recommended range (approximately 4-8 g/L or 0.53-1.07 oz/gal based on research), and highlighted as a warning when above that range.

Miscellaneous

The Miscellaneous Additions section

This section allows you to include water salt additions, yeast nutrients, finings etc to your recipe and works in the same way as all the sections, click the 'Add' button to choose your additions

Miscellaneous ingredients are organized by type and use:

• Types — Water Agent, Fining, Spice, Herb, Flavor, and Other. The type is displayed below each ingredient name.

• Use types — Mash, Sparge, Boil, Flameout, Primary, Secondary, and Bottling. The use type determines at which stage of the brewing process the ingredient is added and is displayed on the right side of each entry.

• Time — For Boil additions, the time in minutes is displayed next to the use type (for example, "15 min Boil").

• Amount and units — Each entry shows its amount along with the appropriate unit (g, mg, kg, ml, l, tsp, tbsp, pkg, items, drops, etc.). If a concentration percentage is specified (common for acids), it is displayed next to the ingredient name.

When Inventory Stock is enabled in Settings, a stock status indicator appears next to each miscellaneous ingredient showing whether it is in stock.

Yeast

The Yeast section

This section allows you to add your yeast to your recipe. Clicking the 'Add' button takes you to a dialog box that works in the same way as the other ingredient dialog boxes. You can search from the box at the top or enter custom details directly in the box. There is also a button to take you directly to the yeast calculator to work out the amount of yeast you need to pitch or the size of starter you need to create. This is accessible by clicking on the 'Calc' button

You can add multiple yeast strains to a recipe. Each yeast entry in the list displays:

• Laboratory and product ID — The yeast manufacturer (for example, "Lallemand", "Fermentis", "White Labs") and the product identifier are shown prominently. If neither is set, the yeast name is displayed instead.

• Attenuation — The expected attenuation percentage is shown next to the product ID.

• Yeast name — The full descriptive name of the yeast strain is displayed below the laboratory/product ID line.

• Starter information — If a starter has been calculated, the starter volume and DME amount are displayed.

• Pitch rate details — After using the yeast calculator, the total number of billion yeast cells and the pitch rate in million cells/ml/degree Plato are shown in a summary area below the yeast entries. If a multi-step starter was calculated, each step is listed with its volume and DME/LME requirements.

ABV Tolerance Warning — If the recipe's predicted ABV would exceed the yeast's maximum ABV tolerance (the maxAbv field), Brewfather adjusts the estimated final gravity and displays a warning message indicating by how much the yeast tolerance was exceeded (for example, "Yeast ABV tolerance limit was exceeded by 1.2%"). This helps you identify when a yeast strain may struggle to fully ferment a high-gravity recipe.

When Inventory Stock is enabled in Settings, a stock status indicator appears next to each yeast entry showing whether it is in stock.

Mash Profile

The Mash Profile section

• Here you set your mash profile. You can choose a preset mash profile or one you have already created by clicking on the 'Change Mash Profile' button

• You can also directly edit the selected profile by clicking on the edit button

The selected mash profile name is shown in the section header (for example, "Mash Profile (Single Infusion, Medium Body)"). Each mash step is displayed as a row showing:

• Step name or type — The name of the step, or the step type (Infusion, Decoction, Temperature) if no custom name is set.

• Temperature — The target temperature for the step.

• Duration — The step time in minutes.

If your equipment profile has "Calculate Strike Water Temperature" enabled, the calculated strike temperature is displayed at the top of the mash step list before the individual steps.

The equipment section of the recipe details also displays the Mash Efficiency percentage, which represents the efficiency of sugar extraction during the mash process. This is separate from the overall Brewhouse Efficiency.

As you make changes, the estimated values at the bottom of the section will change in real time to show the predicted results of your changes. The exception to this is if the Final Gravity has been set to a specific value, which can be done or undone by clicking on the 'Final Gravity' button To undo the set final gravity, just click 'Reset' after clicking the 'Final Gravity' button to get an estimated final gravity value.

Fermentation Profile

The Fermentation Profile section

Here you can choose your fermentation profile from a list of preset fermentation profiles included or from a custom profile you have created yourself.

• Following a common theme you just need to click on the 'Change Fermentation Profile' button to choose another profile

• Click the 'Edit Profile' button to edit the current profile directly

The selected fermentation profile name is shown in the section header. Each fermentation step is displayed as a row showing:

• Step name or type — The name of the step, or the step type (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, Cold Crash, Carbonation, Conditioning) if no custom name is set.

• Temperature — The target temperature for the step.

• Ramp time — If a ramp period is specified, it is shown below the temperature (for example, "2 day ramp"), indicating how many days it takes to transition to this step's temperature.

• Pressure — For pressurized fermentation profiles, a pressure column is displayed showing the target pressure for each step. This column only appears when the fermentation profile has the "pressurized" option enabled.

• Duration — The step time in days.

Carbonation — Below the fermentation steps, the carbonation section lets you set your target carbonation level. If a style is selected, the style's recommended carbonation range is displayed as a Carbonation label (for example, "Carbonation 2.2 - 2.8") and is color-coded green when your target is within range. You can edit the target carbonation by entering a value in the input field. The carbonation is expressed in Volumes of CO2 or g/L depending on your unit settings.

You can also set your carbonation volumes for when you come to package your beer. The style recommended range is shown by the Carbonation label; you can edit the target to your preference by either clicking the up and down arrows to the right of the figure under the label or by double-clicking and editing the value manually.

Water

The Water Section

This section gives you an overview of the quantities of water needed for each stage of the brewing process and the current water profile. You get an estimated pH value for the mash at the top right by the 'Calc' button The 'Calc' button gives you easy access to the water calculator where you can calculate the mineral and acid additions to get the right mineral profile and mash pH.

Toolbar

The recipe designer toolbar provides quick access to common actions:

• Undo / Redo — Step backward or forward through your recent changes. These buttons appear once you have made at least one change to the recipe.

• Save — When autosave is disabled in your recipe settings, a Save button appears in the toolbar allowing you to manually save your changes. When autosave is enabled, a Save button still appears if there are unsaved changes pending, giving you the option to save immediately rather than waiting for the autosave timer.

• Read Mode — Toggle between edit mode and a read-only brew sheet view of your recipe. When Read Mode is active, the toolbar icon is highlighted and the recipe is displayed as a formatted, read-only brew sheet. This is useful for reviewing the recipe without accidentally making changes, or for viewing the recipe in a print-friendly format.

• Print — Generate a PDF of the recipe (web only)

• Public / Private — Toggle whether the recipe is publicly shared or kept private. When public, the icon shows an eye; when private, a lock icon is displayed. If the recipe is public but has validation issues, a warning icon is shown.

• Version Selector — Shows the current version number and opens the version history (see Recipe Versioning)

• Color Adjuster — Open the Color Adjuster tool to adjust your grain bill to hit a target color (see Color Adjuster)

• Brew — Start a brew session from this recipe, taking you to the Batch Planning section

• Close — Close the recipe and return to the previous screen

On larger screens, additional toolbar buttons for Delete, Duplicate, Export, and Share are also visible directly in the toolbar for quick access.

Recipe Details: Folder Selector

In the recipe details section, next to the Author field, a Folder selector lets you assign the recipe to a folder directly from the designer. See Recipe Folders for more on organizing recipes into folders.

Menu

The menu appears as a floating action button (FAB) in the bottom-right corner of the recipe designer. Tapping the FAB opens a vertical list of sub-buttons that provide access to common recipe actions. Not all functions are available in a free account.

The FAB contains the following sub-buttons (from bottom to top):

• Brew — Takes you on to the Batch Planning section which gives you step-by-step instructions for your brew day and timers for each section of the process

• Close / Save & Close — Closes the recipe and takes you back to the previous screen, generally the recipes section screen. When autosave is disabled, the button label reads "Save & Close" and saves before closing.

• Save — Manually save the recipe (only shown when autosave is disabled)

• Share — Provides a URL you can share with people to enable them to see your recipe

• Export — Provides you with the option to export the recipe in

  • PDF

  • BeerXML

  • Brewfather recipe JSON

• Duplicate — This creates another copy of the recipe

• Delete — This deletes the current recipe

Style Ranges

The Style section in the recipe details area displays visual range indicators for each of the key recipe parameters. When a style is selected, each parameter shows a horizontal bar with a shaded region indicating the style's acceptable range and a marker for the recipe's current value. The indicators are color-coded green when the current value falls within the style range.

The following parameters are shown:

• ABV — Alcohol By Volume percentage

• OG — Original Gravity (clickable to set a target OG)

• FG — Final Gravity (clickable to set a target FG)

• Color — Beer color in SRM or EBC depending on your unit settings (clickable to open the Color Adjuster)

• IBU — International Bitterness Units (clickable to set a target IBU)

• BU/GU — Bitterness Units to Gravity Units ratio (clickable to set a target ratio; toggled on/off by clicking the BU/GU label in the hops summary)

• RBR — Relative Bitterness Ratio (toggled on/off by clicking the RBR label in the hops summary)

When a style conformity checkmark appears in the Style section header (a double-check icon), it means all displayed parameters are within the selected style's ranges.

Nutrition Information

When the Nutritional Information feature is enabled in Settings > Features > Nutritional Information, the recipe designer displays nutrition data in the summary area below the mash section, alongside the Final Gravity, Apparent Attenuation, and ABV values. The following nutritional values are shown per serving:

• Calories (kcal) — Total calories per serving, combining contributions from alcohol and carbohydrates

• Kilojoules (kJ) — Total energy in kilojoules per serving

• Carbohydrates (g) — Total carbohydrates in grams per serving

The serving size is determined by your unit settings. The nutritional values are calculated automatically from the recipe's fermentables, original gravity, and final gravity. This feature helps you estimate the nutritional content of your finished beer without needing an external calculator.

Scaling Options

The recipe designer provides several different methods for adjusting recipe quantities, each suited to a different use case:

• Scale Recipe — The Scale button in the Equipment section header scales the entire recipe to a new batch size. All ingredient amounts (fermentables, hops, miscellaneous, and water volumes) are proportionally adjusted so the recipe characteristics (OG, IBU, color, etc.) remain the same at the new volume.

• Batch Size — The Batch Size button changes the batch volume without scaling any ingredient amounts. This is useful when you want to adjust the volume while keeping your ingredient amounts fixed, which will change the resulting OG, IBU, and color values.

• Scale to OG — The OG button in the Fermentables section scales all fermentable amounts linearly to hit a specific target Original Gravity. This adjusts only the fermentable amounts, leaving hops and other ingredients unchanged.

• Scale to IBU — The IBU button in the Hops section scales the 60-minute boil hop addition to reach a target IBU value. Only the 60-minute addition is adjusted; other hop additions remain unchanged.

• Equipment Profile Change — When you change your equipment profile to one with a different batch size, Brewfather prompts you with the option to scale the recipe to match the new equipment. Choosing to scale adjusts all ingredients proportionally. Choosing not to scale keeps the ingredient amounts as they are, which will change the predicted values.

Recipe Image

You can upload a custom photo or image for your recipe. This image is displayed alongside the recipe name in the designer and in the recipe list.

• To add an image, click on the beer color icon to the left of the recipe name. On smaller screens, an image icon appears to the right of the name field instead. This opens a dialog where you can upload a photo from your device.

• If an image has already been uploaded, a thumbnail of the image is shown instead of the beer color icon. Click on the thumbnail to change or remove the image.

• The uploaded image is also used when the recipe is shared publicly or exported.

Inventory Integration

When the Inventory Stock feature is enabled in Settings, the recipe designer shows stock status indicators next to each ingredient (fermentables, hops, miscellaneous, and yeast). This helps you quickly identify which ingredients you have in stock and which ones need to be purchased before brew day.

The stock status feature is toggled using the Show Stock button in the "Other" section of the recipe designer. When enabled, a small status indicator appears next to each ingredient's amount, showing at a glance whether you have sufficient inventory. The indicator is based on the amounts recorded in your inventory.

Profiles in existing recipes

When you change a profile (equipment, mash, fermentation, water) from the profiles page, you have to reselect it in your recipe after you change it. This is because a profile in the recipe is not updated automatically to avoid breaking recipes unintentionally, it will stay at the same value as the profile had when the recipe was created. This goes for all profile types. New recipes will have the updated profile that you starred as default.

Related docs

• Recipes

• Water Calculator

• Equipment Profiles

• Mash Profiles

• Batches