A recipe is a prediction. The finished product is the result. Keeping them in the same library, linked but separate, is the difference between brewing as a hobby and brewing as a practice.
The Product, Not the Process
The Homebrews template is not a brewing log — that's the recipe side. This template is about what came out of the fermentation vessel: what it tastes like, what it measures, whether it carbonated, and what it cost you per bottle.
Final Gravity and ABV% together tell the attenuation story. A mead that finished at 1.020 with 12% ABV reads very differently from one at 0.996 with the same alcohol content. The taste classification — Sweet, Dry, Middling — adds the subjective layer, but the numbers give it context. A "Middling" taste rating on a 1.018 FG tells you something a rating field alone cannot.
The Description field carries the sensory profile: nose, flavour, body, acidity, mouthfeel, clarity, and age when tested. That last note matters more than most brewers record. A session IPA evaluated at two weeks and again at eight weeks are two different products.
The Relational Core
The Recipe field links each finished batch directly to its corresponding entry in a companion Homebrew Recipes library. This isn't just a cross-reference — it's the analytical backbone of iterative brewing. When a batch fails to match expectations, the recipe that produced it is one tap away. When a batch exceeds them, the exact process is documented, not reconstructed from memory.
Sparkling status is a boolean, but it carries significant meaning for carbonation-sensitive styles. A sparkling mead that sat flat changes the evaluation of every subsequent entry from the same process.
Cost per bottle closes the economic loop. Ingredient costs are tracked in the recipe; the finished cost here reflects actual yield. A batch that produced forty bottles versus a planned fifty changes the per-unit economics entirely, and that difference compounds across a cellar of twenty active batches.