From the submit message:
Also added manual tag to bitter pill concoction since this is an expensive item to create.
I'm not sure that is a sufficient motivation to give it a "manual" tag. A time sword is also an "expensive item to create" since it uses a chunk of petrified time, which sells for more than 12 million Meat. Yet, we don't force you to go to the relay browser to make one of those.
Jason's example is a perfect example: we do not want KoLmafia to make a meat stack from fairy gravy and meat from yesterday in order to further use it to make a meat engine, for example. Nor do we want to make a vial of red slime out of two vials of red slime, nor do other pointless slime vial mixing on the way to some other slime concoction.
green beer is marked manual, too. I'm not sure why, other than the fact that we don't have a way to say "this recipe is only available on SSPD" and don't want it to show up all the time in the Item Manager.
The only other "manual" recipe is the bitter pill - and since that is not an ingredient for anything else, there's no reason to prevent KoLmafia from "automatically" creating it on the way to anything else, which is the intent of the "manual" flag.
In conclusion: I'm going to remove the "manual" flag from the bitter pill in concotions.txt.