Colorful Potions Part 1: Not just a drink?

A while ago I stumbled over several random tables in the net (like Inkwell Ideas, Seven Sanctum and Chaotic Shiny) that allow for generating descriptions of potions. They offer randomly generated potion descriptions.

How can we use these description to add flavor to our game?

Lets collect possible cases which could alter our potions:

• There is only ONE true recipe for a potion. All healing potions in your world would be of the same physical appearance.
• There are several recipes for the same potion. This would mean that healing potions can be either red, blue, green or whatever. Might be that every alchemist has his own recipe to produce potions.

• Potions could  have different strength based on their recipe. Could someone brew a strong and a weak version of a potion? For D&D 3.5 where potions may base on the spell effect the potions strength might be related to the experience of the creator. Is it possible to identify the strength of a potion?

• Related to the above case: Potions could exhibit side effect based on their recipe.

• Does the origin of the potions effect matter? Does a divine potion looks different from a alchemist one? Possible general cases here might be: divine, magic (wizards and witches?), alchemy, herb based?

Allowing for different recipes with different strength and possible side effects would easily mean that every potion in your world might be unique and you would have to note down for every potion what they are and how (strong) they work. This might only be practical if in your world only very very few potions exists. Otherwise you will end up in a huge amount of book keeping.

On the other side I like the idea that my players could start as novice alchemist and learn during gameplay which kind of potion they found.

Which options should be included to make up an interesting system but keep the amount of book keeping to a minimum?