> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://brewgravity.com/docs/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Recipes > Building and editing a recipe, and what the numbers mean. The recipe editor is one screen. Ingredients, mash schedule, and live stats are all on it, and the stats update as you type. ## Recipe settings Four fields drive every calculation on the page: The volume you expect in the fermenter. Every gravity figure is a concentration, so this is the single biggest lever on OG. Used for hop utilisation, so it feeds IBU directly. Your brewhouse efficiency — how much of the theoretical sugar you actually extract. This describes *your system*, not the recipe. If imported recipes consistently read high or low, this is usually why. The brewing method. Extract recipes do not use efficiency the same way, because extract yield is not a function of your mash. ## Ingredients Grain, sugar, liquid extract, dry extract, or adjunct. Each carries a weight in kilograms, a colour in SRM, and an extract yield percentage. Weight and yield determine OG; colour determines SRM. Brewgravity ships presets for common malts, so picking "Maris Otter" fills in sensible colour and yield rather than making you look them up. Each addition has an amount in grams, an alpha acid percentage, a time in minutes, and a use: **boil**, **dry hop**, **mash**, **first wort**, **whirlpool**, or **aroma**. Only additions that contribute bitterness affect IBU, and their contribution falls off sharply as time drops — which is exactly why a 5-minute addition barely moves the number and a 60-minute one dominates it. Strain name, type (ale, lager, wheat, wine, champagne), form (liquid, dry, slant, culture), and expected apparent attenuation. Attenuation is what turns OG into estimated FG, and therefore ABV. If you know from experience that a strain finishes drier than the lab number, put your number in — the estimate will follow you rather than the packet. Spices, finings, water agents, herbs, flavourings, and anything else. Each has a type, a use (boil, mash, primary, secondary, bottling), an amount with its own unit, and a time. An ordered schedule of infusion, decoction, or temperature steps, each with a target temperature and a rest duration. A single 60-minute infusion at 66 °C is a perfectly good schedule; step mashes are there when you want them. ## The stats Stats recalculate on every keystroke — there is nothing to press. | Stat | Meaning | | --------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | **OG** | Original gravity from fermentables, batch size, and efficiency | | **FG** | Estimated final gravity from OG and yeast attenuation | | **ABV** | Alcohol by volume | | **IBU** | Bitterness, by hop amount, alpha acid, and contact time | | **SRM** | Colour, which also sets the recipe's colour swatch | | **BU:GU** | Bitterness-to-gravity ratio — the balance number | | **Attenuation** | Apparent and real attenuation | | **Calories** | Per 12 oz and per 330 ml | BU:GU is the fastest sanity check on a recipe. Roughly: 0.3–0.5 reads balanced, above 0.7 reads distinctly bitter, and below 0.25 reads malty and sweet. A number far outside the range for the style you are aiming at usually means a hop or grain amount is off by a factor of ten. ## Versions The right-hand panel has two tabs: **Stats** and **History**. History lists every saved version of this recipe, newest first, with the kind it came from and the numbers it had at the time. Versions appear two ways: | How | When | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Save version** | You press it. Add a label like "Before the Citra swap" to find it later. | | Automatically | Every time you press **Brew**. | Editing a recipe never creates a version on its own — the list stays short enough to be useful. Click any version to see what has changed since it: the individual edits, and the effect on OG, FG, ABV, IBU and SRM. Two icons on each row: Starts a brew session from the version exactly as it was. Your current recipe is not touched. Rewrites the recipe back to that version. It lands as a single undo step, so ⌘Z takes it all back. Saving twice with no changes in between reuses the existing version instead of adding a duplicate. Restoring re-adds any missing ingredients at the end of their list — the ingredients match, the ordering may not. ## Exporting The **Export** menu on a recipe writes it out as **BeerJSON**, **BeerXML**, or **Markdown**. BeerXML is the one other brewing software will accept; Markdown is the one you can paste into a forum post. See [Exporting](/docs/import/exporting). ## Undo Brewgravity keeps an undo history for edits and deletions, including deleting a whole recipe. Rapid edits to the same field collapse into one undo entry, so undo steps back a change rather than a character. Deleting a recipe hides it rather than destroying it. Its ingredients, its brew sessions, and their fermentation logs all stay exactly where they were, so undo brings the whole recipe back — not an empty shell — and the sessions keep working either way, because each one holds its own snapshot of what it brewed. ## The command palette ⌘K (or CtrlK) opens the command palette from anywhere. It creates recipes, jumps to Recipes, Brew Sessions, Inventory, or Import, and searches your recipes by name — which is the fastest way to open one once you have more than a screenful.