What's the most effective thing for shortening a brew day?

sudsmcgee said:

What kind of manifold system are you using? I had slow lauters when using a SS braid, but it flows out freely with my newer copper manifold.

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I do use a SS braid. It might be worthwhile to build a copper manifold though. I think I've seen some DIY posts about that.

sudsmcgee said:

OK, this helps. Your SS tubing is getting crushed by the grain weight. I had this same problem. You need a manifold system to fix it.

Braids work well for 5 gallons batch sparges, but the grain weight for an average 10 gallon batch is too high to maintain proper wort flow.

I dealt with this exact issue and it sounds like our processes are the same.

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Word.

Looks like some copper purchases are in my plans for tomorrow!

Gameface said:

I'm surprised people are using hot water from the hot water heater. I won't even make spaghetti noodles from hot water heater water.

My brew days consistently take 5-6 hours. There might be room to tighten that up, but I just relax or do something else during the dead time if I'm all prepped for the next step.

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What have you got, an old nasty hot water heater?
One of my hot water heaters is about five years old, the other one is maybe three years old.
They get drained occasionally in case of any sediment and have no strange flavors.

If your brew day is that long I hope it's a double decoction and lager that sucker for 3 months.

I concur with the braid getting crushed. I had that problem with my 5 gallon set up and quickly went to the bazooka tube.... a nice option for under 20 bucks. A copper manifold works better with a square or rectangular MLT, but it it's a round cooler, the shape gets a little unwieldy, so I suggest a bazooka tube.. not to say it can't be done with a manifold. Either way, you need something more rigid.

Did you know that some mashes can be ready to run in as little as 15 minutes? The 1 hour mash is just a (mostly) safe guideline. If you look up how to use iodophor to do a starch conversion test, you might find that you can actually start your mashout or lauter in as little as 15-20 minutes. That can shave off 40-45 minutes right there!

Faster clean-up is the best thing you can do, IMO. Nobody likes cleaning up, so the faster and easier, the better. Don't bother getting obsessive with your clean up on the pre-boil side. While the MLT needs to be clean, it doesn't have to be insanely clean. It needs to dry out to prevent the promotion of mold/etc, but I don't obsess over it. Next week's strike water will have a couple dozen parts of a husk floating in it... no big deal. It's pre-boil, and it was dry so it wasn't breeding nasties. The boil kettle gets cleaned immediately because a dirty one requires scrubbing; it'll only get worse with time. For the fermenters, they get a 1-4 day Oxy-Clean soak (no scrubbing, no rinsing, just fill it and walk away). Then they get triple-rinsed and hit with StarSan on brew day, but the MLT gets hosed out, and not much more. As I said, it doesn't have to be sanitary, just make sure it dries completely and reasonably quickly.

Another option is a split-brewday. Working 12 hours shifts, I've been doing a lot of those lately. Mash one night (and collect runnings), boil the next. It doesn't speed up your brew day, but it breaks it down into chunks that are more manageable for some people.

As for cooling, I do it overnight. I've given up on CFC's and IC's in favor of the immersion bath. Fill the bathtub, stick the kettles in, and then go to bed. Voila! My cooling time is no longer a significant part of my brew day. The next morning, I rinse the funnel with starsan drained from the carboy, I dump in the wort, aerate it for a couple minutes, then add the airlock. The cooling and pitching step takes about 10 minutes, because the time I spend sleeping or doing other things doesn't count against it.

+1 on the SS braid.
Those things can turn to junk quick.
I only got 1 or 2 brews outta mine and then I had 2 stuck mashes in a row.
Picked up a bazooka tube at my LHBS for about $20.
My efficiency has been between 75-80% every brew and no more stuck/slow lautering.

sudsmcgee said:

OK, this helps. Your SS tubing is getting crushed by the grain weight. I had this same problem. You need a manifold system to fix it.

Braids work well for 5 gallons batch sparges, but the grain weight for an average 10 gallon batch is too high to maintain proper wort flow.

I dealt with this exact issue and it sounds like our processes are the same.

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Either a false bottom or a manifold would be the way to go.

For what it's worth, my 10 gal all-grain brew took 5 hours and 15 minutes today including grain crush and clean up.

45_70sharps said:

What have you got, an old nasty hot water heater?
One of my hot water heaters is about five years old, the other one is maybe three years old.
They get drained occasionally in case of any sediment and have no strange flavors.

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No my house is 10 years old, along with the water heater. My wife just has me trained really well and told me to never use hot water from the tap for cooking or she'd hit me with a newspaper.

Gameface said:

No my house is 10 years old, along with the water heater. My wife just has me trained really well and told me to never use hot water from the tap for cooking or she'd hit me with a newspaper.

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Then she can do the cooking.

pedimac said:

Then she can do the cooking.

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But I like cooking.

Gameface said:

No my house is 10 years old, along with the water heater. My wife just has me trained really well and told me to never use hot water from the tap for cooking or she'd hit me with a newspaper.

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Do yourself a favor some time.
Cool some hot water from the tap, then do a side by side with cold tap water when they are the same temperature.

Then with this new knowledge go back to whatever makes it a happy home.
You might feel a little better about saving time by using hot water when you brew though.
A hot water heater and an all electric brew pot have a lot in common.
I would say you should flush the tank every one to four years, depending on the water where you are.
Sediment can cause the elements to go out sooner.

Better yet, boil noodles like you suggested.
the hot water tank water might taste different than the cold tap water due to heating it and maybe less oxygen in it.

I fill my HLT with an outside faucet running through an RV house connected to a charcoal filter, so all this is pretty moot. I'm not going to start filling off my kitchen sink. I get my HLT up to temp pretty quick and I'm usually doing other stuff while it's heating.

I'll stop hating on hot water heater water now.

OK here I go again, Dr. Doom. Don't use water from your water heater to brew. From the EPA:

Flush your pipes before drinking, and only use cold water for consumption. The more time water has been sitting in your home's pipes, the more lead it may contain. Anytime the water in a particular faucet has not been used for six hours or longer, "flush" your cold-water pipes by running the water until it becomes as cold as it will get. This could take as little as five to thirty seconds if there has been recent heavy water use such as showering or toilet flushing. Otherwise, it could take two minutes or longer. Your water utility will inform you if longer flushing times are needed to respond to local conditions.

Use only water from the cold-water tap for drinking, cooking, and especially for making baby formula. Hot water is likely to contain higher levels of lead. The two actions recommended above are very important to the health of your family. They will probably be effective in reducing lead levels because most of the lead in household water usually comes from the plumbing in your house, not from the local water supply.

Sir Humpsalot said:

Did you know that some mashes can be ready to run in as little as 15 minutes? The 1 hour mash is just a (mostly) safe guideline. If you look up how to use iodophor to do a starch conversion test, you might find that you can actually start your mashout or lauter in as little as 15-20 minutes

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Need to be careful there. A starch test only confirms conversion, not the state of your overall enzymatic activity. One could end up with a significantly less fermentable wort than intended.

I don´t know if using hot water is rigth or wrong for brewing. I use cold water for everything specially beer and pasta. When I was 15 years old I was helping my grandmother (she was italian) and she told e to put some water in a pot and bring it to boil... I used hot water and she hit me with a wooden spoon and told me not to do it again, her pasta was propably the best that I had in my life and therefore I choose listen to her without any scientifical evidence... Now this can´t be more off topic but it thinks I miss my grannie

dbrewski said:

OK here I go again, Dr. Doom. Don't use water from your water heater to brew. From the EPA:

Flush your pipes before drinking, and only use cold water for consumption. The more time water has been sitting in your home's pipes, the more lead it may contain.

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More sky is falling crap dreamed up by a lawyer.
Your house not only has to be pretty old to have any lead present in the plumbing, it is going to have to be old with very good water.
Metal pipes that old tend to be clogged with mineral deposits, if the mineral deposits aren't present then the scaling from the pipes would have them plugged up. Either way the pipes get changed some time in the last 50 years.

Being in a hot water tank wont increase the exposure to lead either. It's the same water as the cold water.
It sits in a tank for a short period of time and then gets piped ( in my case about through about 15' of plastic pipe ) to the sink.
Maybe if lived in an old apartment where they had an old boiler for the hot water, but 99.9999% of people have a modern hot water heater with no lead.

I keep my HLT kettle outside in place from brew day to brew day. It's a stainless steel kettle with all stainless steel fittings. The lid only comes off when I fill it with new water. Sometimes there is water left over from the previous brew day. I'm sure the water is safe. I'm not scared of the water, nor has my lawyer given me any advice in regard to the water. You wanna know what I do at the start of a brew day? I dump the old water, rinse out the kettle, run some water through the valve and then add fresh water from the hose that has been running for 5-10 min.

Does it make any difference? I don't know, but it makes me feel better about the water I'm going to be drinking in the form of beer a few weeks down the line so I'm gonna go ahead and keep doing all that along with not using hot water from my hot water heater for consumption.

If it's what you like to do, then by all means do it that way.
It certainly doesn't hurt anything to start with cold water. Takes a little longer and uses a bit more propane but that doesn't matter if you don't mind.
I've filled with cold water from my outside faucet before for sparge water. Did it just because I wasn't thinking and had been using that water for cleaning stuff. Took a little longer to get hot but luckily I started on the sparge water early enough that it didn't matter.

By the way, with cooking I could see it possibly making a difference. Whatever you are cooking is going through a different process when it goes from cold to hot than if you start off with hot and go to a boil.

It's your choice of course, but if you read the page, it detailed exactly how lead gets into your water even from new pipes and fixtures. And attorneys are involved in this how? It's a document released by the FDA for the protection of people's health.

Hopefully everyone is clear on the health risks of lead, there is no threshold under which lead exposure is safe, ya da, ya da, feel free to ignore if you feel the FDA is in cahoots with evil lawyers to scare you away from that delicious lead-free hot water.

I shorted my cooling time this past summer by buying a $60 1/8hp sump pump to serve the same purpose as a pre-chiller. Big rubbermaid full of tap water that I slowly fill during the boil. I pump the water through the IC and save it do some laundry or for clean-up. Once the water level is down to a few inches in the tub, the wort is ~25C so I add ice to it and let it recirculate. It happened to be cheaper and less equipment to store then a pre-chiller for me and works fantastic.

I also would recommend against using hot water from the tap, last time I replaced my water tank the amount of thick rust water that drained out was pretty gross. Perhaps split your mash water into 2 pots and heat it on two different burners?

The thing I have done to make my brew day seem shorter is to incorporate it into my every day stuff. I put strike water on in the morning when I'm doing other things and mash before lunch. Sometimes it will sit for 3 or 4 hours before I get to sparge but I don't lose much heat. I heat sparge water again while taking care of other things that need to be done then take about an hour to sparge. I let the wort sit till dinner time when I turn on the burner to get it going. By the time dinner is done and the kids are in bed I have a boiling pot of wort on the burner ready to go. All I have to do is boil, cool, and clean up. Works well for when I want to do a longer boil because I just turn on the burner when dinner is cooking to add an hour or so.

I actually get done later at night if I do extract because I have to steep the grains and get the wort boiling again after adding the extract.