I want to start a conversation with the brewers, because I have been watching how some of your more complex batches actually behave in the system.
Lately I am seeing a lot that does not fit a tidy straight line: blending two beers together, barrel aging, and even pulling stock back out of a serving tank into a Brite. Our current workflow leans on a linear "Next Step" button that marches a batch forward one stage at a time, and I am not sure that is the friendliest way to capture what is really happening on the floor.
Part of what is driving this is that I keep adding more and more ways to move volume around, and each one makes the linear Next Step feel less needed. We now have:
- Partial transfers between tanks.
- Moving beer into a brand new tank that was not even part of the recipe.
- As of this morning, the ability to start a blend or a split from a specific tank rather than only the "current step" tank.
The whole "current step" idea assumes a batch lives in one active tank at a time. More and more I am seeing batches with two or three tanks active at once, while only a single step is marked as active. The model and the reality are drifting apart.
So here is the idea I am chewing on. Instead of stepping a whole batch forward, what if you had granular, tank by tank volume control? You would simply move volume from one tank into another whenever you need to, in whatever direction makes sense, and the system would follow your lead rather than the recipe