5 min read

Lot Additions in Blended

Written by

Matt Witte

Published on

November 27, 2024

Recording additions to your lots is one of the most important facets of winemaking production tracking, not only from the standpoint of keeping good records, but because it touches aspects of TTB and FDA compliance, it interacts with your inventory of ingredients and additives, and because you often need to do a calculation on the side to determine how much of something to add. The Blended addition workflow has a lot of functionality tucked inside to accomplish these goals and to accommodate the various ways you might want to do additions. Let’s dig in and see how it works.

There are a number of ways to start an addition in Blended. Your production protocol can include steps to do additions. In this example we have a protocol set up for doing SO2 adds at the crusher. Click on the button to start the addition:

You can click on the checkbox next to a lot and choose an addition from the “Addition” menu button. If the additive you want is not in the list, you can choose Custom Addition… at the end of the menu.

If you click on a lot’s name to go to its details page, there is an Additions menu button there as well.

On mobile, if you’re viewing the details of a lot (by tapping on it from the production tab), you can do additions from the round orange action button in the lower right corner.

When doing an addition, the interface has three ways of specifying how much of the additive to use. Let’s see how they’re used.

Fixed Amount

This addition mode is the one to use if you know the exact weight or volume of the addition you want to make, either because the addition doesn’t need to scale with the lot volume, or because you’ve already calculated the amount and are ready to plug it in.

If the additive exists in your materials inventory, it will let you choose which batch of inventory to use, and when you record the addition it will deduct the amount from the on-hand quantity of that additive. If you run out of one batch and need to make up the rest from another batch, you can add multiple batches by clicking on the + button next to the quantity input.

If the additive isn’t in your materials inventory, then no problem, it just won’t show you those options in the addition UI:

Concentration

This takes the addition amount as a concentration, either in W/V units (e.g. g/L) or unitless (V/V would reduce to % or ppm), and it multiplies this by the lot volume to calculate the weight or volume of the addition to make. This is especially handy with types of additions where you tend to add at a given rate, for example, a yeast addition at 1 g/gal.

Converting units

The calculator chooses output units for you, in this case grams, but if you’d like something different, say pounds, you can choose a different unit for the Target quantity and it will convert for you.

A note about SO2 additions

Don’t use the concentration addition type for doing KMBS SO2 additions of the form of “add 20 ppm of SO2”. The concentration in this addition mode is referring to the concentration of the actual ingredient you’re adding (which would mean adding 20 grams of KMBS for each million grams of liquid), whereas this type of SO2 addition really is shorthand for “Add enough KMBS to raise the Free SO2 by 20ppm”. To do this calculator, use the Measurement Target addition type below.

Calculators/Measurement Target

Blended has built-in calculators to help you determine addition quantities where the goal is for a certain measurement to reach a given target. A prime example is doing SO2 additions, where the goal is to achieve a certain Free SO2 level after the addition. Without Blended, you’d need to look up the previous measurement value and plug the numbers into an online wine additions calculator, scribble the number on a piece of scrap paper, and triple-check everything to make sure you didn’t make a mistake. But with Blended, it can look up the latest measurement from your data, take the target you’ve told it (which it can pull from your production protocol if the addition is set up there), scale to the volume of your lot, and tell you the amount of Potassium Metabisulfite (KMBS) to add, right there in the workflow.

Blended has built-in calculators for:

KMBS to reach a Free SO2 target
Acid additions to reach a pH or TA target
Water additions to reach a brix or SG target
Sugar additions to reach a brix of SG target
Honey additions to reach a SG target (for mead-making)
Spirits additions to reach an ABV target

The water, honey, and spirits calculators use the Pearson’s Square method to calculate the addition.

In this addition type, we choose the measurement we want to target, in this case Free SO2. Blended will look at the lot’s history to see the last value of this measurement, if any, and will put it in the Last value field and tell you when it was measured. If it doesn’t have a measurement or if you have a more up-to-date value, you can enter it manually instead. Enter the measurement value you want to reach in the Target value field, and Blended will do the rest – it will calculate the amount of additive for the size of your lot, with a brief explanation of the calculation below the value.

As before, if you want to change the units, you can do so next to the Calculated value field.

If you don’t want to worry about a previous calculation and target value and just “Add 20 ppm of SO2”, then enter 20 ppm for the target value, 0 ppm for the last value, and it will calculate the amount to add for a 20 ppm delta.

Doing Large Additions

If you’re adding enough of an additive that it will cause a significant increase in the volume of the lot, the UI will advise you of the fact and adjust the lot volume. This is most obvious if you’re doing a water add to reduce brix. In this example, the UI tells us to add 31.6 gallons of water, and the lot’s overall volume will increase from 350 gallons to 381.6 (though it will usually show you a round 382 gallons).