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Equipment, cooperage, and locations

Track stills, vessels, and other equipment; manage barrels and oak alternatives; and organize your facility into a location hierarchy.

Three related registers keep the physical side of your workspace organized: Equipment (stills, tanks, and machinery), Cooperage (barrels and oak alternatives), and Locations (the places your sensors live). All three are available on every plan. On a commercial workspace all three sit in the Inventory group; on a hobby workspace Equipment leads in Day to day and Cooperage and Locations sit under Records.

Equipment

Equipment is your stills, vessels, and other production machinery. It lives under Equipment in the navigation.

View your equipment

  1. Choose Equipment. The list shows each item's Name, Role, Capacity, and Status. A vessel currently holding a live batch also shows an In use by line naming that batch, alongside (not instead of) its manually-set state.
  2. Narrow the list with the controls above the table:
    • Search — the Search equipment by name… box.
    • Show archived — tick this to include archived equipment.
  3. Choose Edit on a row to open it.
  4. Choose Load more to fetch the next page if there is one.

An empty workspace shows No equipment yet, pointing you to Add starter equipment at the top of the page as the quick way in, with Add equipment manually beside it. (Where the starter gallery is switched off, the page has a single Add equipment button.)

Add starter equipment (the quick way)

If you're setting up a workspace from scratch, the starter gallery is faster than filling in the form for each piece: pick the gear you already have and Brewstiller sets it up with a sensible default size.

  1. Choose Add starter equipment — it sits next to Add equipment manually at the top of the Equipment list, and also appears in your Home dashboard's quick actions while you have no equipment, and as a card on the last step of the setup wizard.
  2. The page heading reads Add starter equipment. Each card is a common piece of gear — a glass carboy, a brew bucket, a demijohn, a brew kettle, an all-in-one electric brewer, a mash tun, a hot liquor tank — narrowed to what suits what your workspace makes.
  3. On a card you want, check the Size (US gal) — it's pre-filled with a sensible default — and change it if yours is a different size.
  4. Choose + Add. The card switches to Added ✓; Add another puts the card back if you have a second one of the same thing.
  5. Add as many as you like, then choose Done — go to equipment.

Gear you've already added is marked Added ✓ from the start, so you can't accidentally double it up. If nothing in the gallery applies to your workspace you'll see No starter equipment to show and a Go to equipment button — add it by hand instead.

Everything the gallery creates is ordinary equipment: rename it, change its capacity, or set its role from the Equipment list afterwards.

Beta — starter equipment. The starter gallery is on by default during the beta but can be switched off per environment. If you don't see Add starter equipment, it isn't turned on for you — use Add equipment below instead.

Add equipment

  1. From the Equipment list, choose Add equipment manually (or Add equipment where the starter gallery is switched off). The heading reads Add equipment.
  2. Under Equipment details, fill in:
    • Name or label — for example, Fermenter #3.
    • Equipment type — pick from your workspace's equipment types, or leave it Untyped.
    • Role — what this piece does: Still, Fermentation vessel, Mash vessel, Brite tank, Bottling line, Canning line, Pump, Heat exchanger, Crusher, Press, Continuous mixture vessel, or Other.
  3. Under Capacity & gauging, optionally add:
    • Capacity and Unit — for example, 500 and L.
    • Tare weight — the empty weight.
    • Gauging certified on — the date this equipment was gauge-certified.
  4. Choose Add equipment to save. Use Back to list to return without saving.

Edit equipment and set a vessel's state

  1. From the Equipment list, choose Edit on the item's row. The heading reads Edit equipment.
  2. Change any of the Equipment details or Capacity & gauging fields and choose Save equipment.
  3. If the item is a vessel, use the Vessel state card to set its current state: Empty, In use, Dirty, or Maintenance. A vessel can only move along its cleaning cycle (empty → in use → dirty → empty) or into maintenance; if you pick a state it can't move to yet, Brewstiller tells you the change isn't allowed right now.
  4. If this equipment's role is Still, an Open Still View button appears — use it to jump to the live distillation view for that still (see Monitor a distillation run with Still View).

If you have read-only access, the form says so and an admin needs to make the change.

Cooperage

Cooperage is your barrels and oak alternatives. It lives under Cooperage in the navigation.

View your cooperage

  1. Choose Cooperage. The list shows each barrel's Identifier, Role, Status, and number of Fills. Today every barrel's Status reads Empty until you retire it — the Filled status is reserved for once a fill is recorded, which nothing does automatically yet.
  2. Narrow the list with:
    • Search — the Search barrels by identifier… box.
    • Status — All, Filled, Empty, or Retired.
  3. Choose Edit on a row (or View if the barrel is retired) to open it.

An empty workspace shows No barrels yet with an Add barrel button.

Add a barrel

  1. From the Cooperage list, choose Add barrel. The heading reads Add barrel.
  2. Under Barrel details, fill in:
    • Identifier — for example, Barrel #042.
    • Cooperage type — pick from your workspace's cooperage types, or leave it Untyped.
    • Role — Standard (discrete fill), Solera, or Infinity barrel.
    • Capacity and Unit — for example, 200 and L.
  3. Choose Add barrel to save.

A barrel's Status and its Fills count are shown in the list, not set on this form. Today the Fills count reads 0 until it has evidence of a fill, then reads — ("Not counted yet") rather than a wrong number — an automatic fill tally isn't tracked yet.

Retire a barrel

Retiring is permanent — a retired barrel can never be refilled or brought back into service. Its history stays visible.

  1. From the Cooperage list, open the barrel with Edit.
  2. Choose Retire barrel.
  3. In the confirmation dialog (Retire this barrel?), choose Retire barrel to confirm, or Cancel to keep it in service.

Once retired, the barrel opens read-only with a banner explaining it can no longer be refilled or edited.

Locations

Locations are where your sensors live. Nest one inside another to build a tree: a rackhouse and its floors, a cooler, a shelf in the garage. Locations also host environmental sensors and cooler-monitoring scope. They live under Locations in the navigation.

Locations are shown as a tree rather than a table, and you build the tree with a dialog rather than a separate page.

Build your location hierarchy

  1. Choose Locations. You'll see your location tree, or No locations yet if you haven't added any.
  2. To add a top-level location, choose Add location (top right).
  3. In the dialog, fill in:
    • Name — for example, Rackhouse A.
    • Parent location — leave it on (No parent — a top-level location) for a top-level entry, or pick a parent to nest it underneath.
    • Type — Rackhouse, Cooler, Floor, Lab, Warehouse, Tank farm, or Other.
  4. Choose Add location to save.
  5. To add a location underneath an existing one, choose Add child on that node in the tree — it opens the same dialog with the parent already set.
  6. To rename, move, or re-type a location, choose Edit on its node, change the Name, Parent location, or Type, and choose Save location.

Every workspace has a limit on how many locations it can hold, depending on your plan. If you reach it, Brewstiller tells you so and you'll need to upgrade your plan to add more.