The gravity reading at pitch tells you what you put in. The gravity reading at packaging tells you what fermentation actually did with it. Most recipe management systems track the former and ignore the latter. This template tracks both — because attenuation is where the recipe meets reality.
What This Template Records
The core is the recipe itself: Name, Type (Beer, Mead, Wine, Fruit Wine, Root Beer, and others), Taste profile, Ingredients, and Process. These four fields are the repeatable experiment. Everything else evaluates how the experiment ran.
Original Gravity establishes the fermentation potential. Final Gravity measures the completion of fermentation. The spread between them — attenuation — tells you whether the yeast performed as expected, whether fermentation stalled, or whether the recipe simply ran differently than designed. Tracking OG and FG separately across every batch reveals patterns that aggregate ABV numbers hide.
The Image field documents the finished product visually — colour, clarity, carbonation level in the glass. These are details that text descriptions approximate but never fully capture, and they matter when evaluating whether the same recipe produced consistent results across multiple batches.
The Results Connection
The Results field links each recipe to its corresponding entries in the companion Homebrews library. That relational structure turns a recipe archive into a longitudinal brewing record. A Belgian tripel recipe with twelve iterations, each linked to a finished batch with its own FG, taste rating, and cost-per-bottle, tells a story about process refinement that a standalone recipe never could.
Taste classification — Sweet, Dry, Middling — at the recipe level sets the intention. The finished batch may confirm it or contradict it. The gap between intended and actual taste profile is where recipe development actually happens.
Memento's linked libraries make this two-library system work without duplication. The recipe stays in one place; the results accumulate around it. Searching for every batch produced from a specific recipe is a filter, not a manual cross-reference.