Tried to do waaay too much.

Ugh,

So yesterday the plan was to brew up 10 delicious gallons of EdWort's HPA. I was going to start heating my strike water around 10 am.

Instead, I overslept and didn't even start getting my gear together until after noon!

In addition to the regular activities of brewing, I had to keg a batch of my copper ale to keg, rack 10 gallons of Cheese's VCCA to secondary, clean out those carboys for the incoming HPA, not to mention melting the 5 gallon slug of ice that had collected in my kettle outside (doh!) and making an unplanned trip for another LP bottle during strike heating.

On top of that, I decided to move my operation inside with the exception of the banjo burner, so I was shuttling between 8 and 13 gallons of hot liquid back and forth from the garage in a 25g pot! Fortunately, I have a dolly that I could wheel it around on, so moving it back and forth was pretty easy. Reconfiguring my brewing setup for my kitchen, however, was not! Hoses to and from the pump and chiller went every which way, and there were coolers and tools and kegs and buckets everywhere!

So instead of just brewing, I was:

Brewing
Setting up a new system for chilling/pumping indoors
Cleaning, kegging and racking
Making a godawful mess with a (in retrospect) laughable number of spills, splashes, and drops!

I think Red was getting tired of me yelling at myself.

In the end, all the beer ended up safely where it was supposed to go, but I'll never tackle all that at once again. Brew day will be brew day, and that's all!

Holy crap man, I thought I was "pushing the limit" yesterday by brewing a 5 gallon batch and moving another one to secondary.

I did finally commit to my wife that I would stop cooking indoors.

I guess the stout really stunk it up.

sTango said:

Holy crap man, I thought I was "pushing the limit" yesterday by brewing a 5 gallon batch and moving another one to secondary.

I did finally commit to my wife that I would stop cooking indoors.

I guess the stout really stunk it up.

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hehyehehe, my bswmbo was dissapointed when i moved outside. turns out she likes the smell of the boiling wort but not the taste of beer

Ya that sounds like a bit much, but if you do something enough it becomes almost automatic.

I used to have a heck of a time doing 2 brews in 1 day. Now I do two brews almost 90% of the time.

When it becomes "work", it's time to back off a little, change process, or something.

Bottling always seemed like work to me. That's why I moved to kegging.

My 3-tier has also made brew days seem less like work.

ohiobrutus said:

I used to have a heck of a time doing 2 brews in 1 day. Now I do two brews almost 90% of the time.

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Do you start the 2nd while the first is still boiling, or do you wait until the 1st is all done before starting #2? I did a back-to-back, overlapped, brew day a while back. It was definately work for part of it.

Lil' Sparky said:

When it becomes "work", it's time to back off a little, change process, or something.

Bottling always seemed like work to me. That's why I moved to kegging.

My 3-tier has also made brew days seem less like work.



Do you start the 2nd while the first is still boiling, or do you wait until the 1st is all done before starting #2? I did a back-to-back, overlapped, brew day a while back. It was definately work for part of it.

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I mash the 2nd brew while the first one is boiling. It takes a bit of planning when I've only got one burner and one keggle, (an extra stockpot and buckets come in handy) but I've done it about 10 times now so it's not as overwhelming as it used to be. You're right though... the time from the sparge on the first brew up until the 1st brew boil/2nd brew mash is certainly not a time to take a break for a pint.