Recipe
What you intend to brew. A recipe owns its fermentables, hops,
yeasts, other ingredients, and mash steps, plus the brewhouse
numbers those calculations depend on: batch size, boil time, and efficiency.A recipe is a plan. Editing it never rewrites the history of beers you have
already brewed from it — see Recipe version below for how that works.
Recipe version
A snapshot of a recipe at one moment, frozen. Versions are created two ways:
you save one yourself from the History tab, and every brew day saves one
automatically.A version never changes once written. That is what lets a brew session point
at one and still show the recipe as brewed however much the recipe moves
on afterwards. From the History tab you can compare any version against the
recipe as it stands, restore it, or brew it again as it was.
Saving a version when nothing has changed reuses the last one rather than
adding a duplicate, so brewing the same unchanged recipe four times gives
you four sessions and one version.
Brew session
One actual brew day, made from a recipe. A session owns its steps (the
brew day checklist) and its fermentation logs, and records what really
happened: brew date, measured OG and FG, when fermentation started, when it
finished.One recipe can have many sessions. That is the point — the third time you
brew a beer is where the interesting data is.Every session pins the recipe version it was brewed from, so its brew day
numbers — strike water, hop schedule, OG and FG targets — are the ones you
actually brewed with, not whatever the recipe says today.
Deleting a recipe does not delete its sessions. The recipe is hidden and
restorable, and its sessions keep working: each one still holds the
snapshot of what it brewed.
Fermentation log
A single timestamped reading against a session: gravity, temperature, pH,
volume, notes, or any combination. Readings marked as annotations show
up as labelled events on the fermentation chart rather than as data points.
Inventory item
An ingredient you physically have, independent of any recipe: a category
(fermentable, hop, yeast, or misc), an amount, and the fields that matter
for that category — alpha acid for hops, colour and yield for grain,
attenuation for yeast.
How a session gets its status
Sessions move through four states. Nothing is enforced — you can set any status at any time — but the intended path is:Units
Brewgravity stores everything in metric, always: kilograms, grams, litres, degrees Celsius, minutes. That is what the API returns, whatever you have selected in the app. What you see is a display preference. Switch Settings → Unit system to US and the app shows pounds, ounces, gallons, and Fahrenheit while storing the same underlying numbers. Two brewers on the same account can prefer different units without either of them converting anything by hand.Gravity readings are the exception worth knowing about: they are stored as
specific gravity, but you can enter them as SG, degrees Plato, or Brix, and
Brewgravity records which unit you typed so the reading round-trips correctly.
Ownership
Every recipe, session, log, and inventory item belongs to exactly one account — yours. There is no sharing model, no team workspace, and no public recipe library. The API enforces this on every request: an id that is not yours returns404, not 403, because whether it exists at all is none of the caller’s
business.