UI for Water and Salts

[matty0ung]

Would like to get folks' thinking on how we show waters and salts.

As part of the BeerJSON work, I've been getting my head around where and how Water and Salt are used in relation to a Recipe. After a bit of experimenting, I realised that the "Water Chemistry" tool (WaterDialog in the code) has recipe-specific data, which shows up when you go the "Brewday" tab and click "Generate Instructions". But I'm generally left with a feeling that a Recipe's water and salts are a bit hidden in the UI.

I was wondering if there are strong reasons for or against showing waters and salts in, say, the bottom section of the main window where we show Fermentables/Hops/Miscellaneous/Yeast/Mash?

My starting point was thinking:

• Recipe has an intended/desired water profile (and this can be stored in BeerXML or BeerJSON)
• We can calculate how much water of this profile is needed based on the batch size, boil size, mash steps etc
• The brewer has a starting water profile, which usually doesn't change very frequently (or can it?)
• Using the Water Chemistry tool, the brewer can work out what salts etc to add at what stage to get the starting water profile as close as possible to the recipe water profile
• These salt additions are something you want to know on your own brew day, but probably not something you need to include when sharing the recipe with other brewers (because they'll need to work out their own salt additions based on their own starting water profile). So it's not surprising that BeerXML and BeerJSON don't have any parallel to our Salt object.
• Even though salt additions are a bit personal to each brewer, it would still be useful to see a list of salts in each recipe next to other ingredients (Hops, Fermentables, etc) and to manage your inventory in the same way.
• Salts are a bit different from Hops and Fermentables in that we don't allow you to create new ones, only new usages of them. But this could be handled in the UI just by suppressing "create new" controls etc.

Is this a sensible line of thought/inquiry, or would I be breaking the UI by surfacing things that have deliberately been hidden until now?