Any way to speed up the brew day?

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Shoemaker

Shoemaker

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It takes me, from heating up my sparge water, to cleaning out my keggle at the end, 7 hours to do a 10 gallon batch. I know I can do a few things to speed up the process (like getting a separate keggle and burner to heat my sparge water).

What has helped speed up your process on brew day?
 
I got a personal trainer to shout "encouragements" at me; also at the kettle (to speed up the boil). Not sure they worked though...

I was able to cut a brewing day down to 6 hours (maybe 5.5 with the wind at my back) by running a dedicated HLT, MLT, and Kettle (standard 3 vessel operation). With the HLT you can reduce time by jusrt heating "enough" for Mash-In, then again for any steps, and finally sparge water. You can cut some time during the mash if you finish with ~15 minutes at 158*F (I get good conversion with 30 minutes at 150 then 15 at 158 for 45 minutes total thanks to these modern malts).

Really the best "time saver" was to take a day off in the middle of the week when the kids are at school/daycare and the wife is at work. I still like to try to optimize the timing of each run but I don't feel under the gun to finish so it feels like a hobby again instead of a race.

My best advice is to sketch out you process on a timeline and see where you could shave a little off here or there, maybe squeeze an hour or so out in the process.
 
What are you using for chilling? have you considered a large plate chiller?

What type of burner are you using? If it's taking forever to heat your water maybe upgrade your burner?

I haven't been brewing for that long but when I got into it I went straight to AG. I bought a banjo burner and a 40 plate chiller (thermenator). My brew days don't seem to take near as long as what people describe on here. I just try to clean and stay on top of things throughout the entire process so that I dont have to do it at the end. ****disclaimer, by no means am I a pro
 
The biggest thing that has shortened my brewing day is FermCap. It allows me to walk away from the kettle and clean stuff while I'm brewing. After transferring to the fermenter, usually all I have to clean is the chiller and the kettle.

I also speed up my sparge. Sure, it lowers my efficiency, but at a cost of a couple pounds of grain, it's worth my time.
 
On paper my usual 10 gallon day goes about like this...
Set-up and system and heat strike water - 30min (mill grain while heating).
Dough-In to 111* - 10 min
Step to/at 150* - 30 min
Step to/at 158* - 15 min
Mash-out/Recirculate - 10 min
Lauter/Sparge (fly) - 50 min
Boil - 60 min
Chill/Pitch ~30 min (plate)
Clean-up - 60 min

A nice lean 4:55, however...In practice I can generally count on adding at least an hour for hiccups, breakages, and (in the case of cleaning) general lollygagging, sandbagging, goldbricking etc.
 
  • Pre-wash/sanitize the carboy(s) the day before (cover with cling wrap & rubber band)
  • Weigh & mill grains, and weigh hops the day before
  • Set-up the equipment the day before, along with the mash water into the kettle (keep covered)
  • Start heating the wort when you have about 1/3 of the volume in the kettle (if your equipment permits)

I'm at 5.5 hours for a 10.5 gallon batch, or 8 hours for 2x 10.5-gallon batches.

MC
 
Shoemaker said:
What has helped speed up your process on brew day?
Click to expand...

hate to say it and sound like i'm ignoring your question, but if you want to speed up your brew day and get it over with, you're in the wrong hobby. it's supposed to be relaxing and carefree. not a race. i do a 5g all-grain in 3 1/2 hours, and 10 in 4 1/2, and i love the whole process
 
While more than half way through fly sparging, turn the heat on low under the brew kettle. If you time it right your kettle will come to a boil as the last of the sparge is done.

That saves me time and maybe a little gas.
 
I use a cheap turkey fryer for a full boil. The burner isn't all that great and it takes quite a while to get several gallons of wort to a boil. I fixed this by adding a homemade heat stick to my boil kettle while I'm sparging. This shortens the time that it takes to bring to a boil significantly, not to mention the savings on propane. Something to think about...
 
lumpher said:
hate to say it and sound like i'm ignoring your question, but if you want to speed up your brew day and get it over with, you're in the wrong hobby. it's supposed to be relaxing and carefree. not a race. i do a 5g all-grain in 3 1/2 hours, and 10 in 4 1/2, and i love the whole process
Click to expand...

No offense dude but i don't understand how you can tell someone they are in the wrong hobby... It is his hobby he is inquiring about, not yours. In his case, he is looking to cut back on brew time. Either help him or keep your opinion to your self.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you do a 5 gal AG in 3.5 hours? Is that even possible? If it is, how do you relax and stay carefree?
 
I measure the water and hops (vacuum packed of course) the night before and set everything out that I need (that can be). This includes grinding the grain ahead of time. This combined with batch sparging has reduced my brew days to ~5 hours if I'm on my game and don't have to make any repairs during the brew session.

That being the case I enjoy my brew days and refuse to get in a hurry. If I do then I shouldn't have been brewing that day.
 
I clock in at like four hours and that is considering I did nothing at all the night before. 60min mash, 15 min batch sparge, and 60 min boil. Clean and prep as you go. After I transfer to the fermenter all I really have to do is clean my pump and chiller, which really just consists of running starsan though them, and scrub the BK.
 
Brew only at midnight on daylight-savings time day, guaranteed to shave an hour off your brew time. :cross:

Everyone pretty much covered all the big reductions:

-Good burner to cut time waiting for liquid to heat
-Good chiller to cut time waiting for liquid to cool
-Do as much prep/clean as you can when waiting for mash and boil
-Plan out entire process ahead of time to reduce downtime/surprises

My brew day takes about 5 hours for a 5g BIAB AG batch, but since most of that time is waiting (60 min mash, 60 min boil, 60+ mins for my IC to chill wort) I don't mind. If I had a better chiller I could knock an hour off probably...but I usually just set it to drain into my sink and go watch TV, read HBT, or update my brew journal. If I was forced to rbew outside in bad weather or in a garage I might feel differently, but since I use my kitchen stove (luckily I have a badass "quick boil" burner and Nat. Gas) I can wander anywhere in the house and wait for my timers to beep at me.

If you could accellerate your brew-rig to relativistic speeds approaching the speed of light that might help too.
 
If I can't take my time on a brew day, I don't brew. There's nothing worse, imo, than rushing a brew. I usually get up quite early and make myself a good breakfast to get the energy levels up. I then go through to my brew area (garage), fire up my computer and put on some music. From there I put the water on to boil and begin the brew process. As the day passes, I more than likely crack open a few beers and enjoy the day. All in all, it takes pretty much the whole day.
 
Nothing wrong with speeding up the brew day. I know that I've had days that were longer than they needed to be. Personally, if I'm spending more than 5.5 hours, it starts to feel too long.

What are the parts of the day that are taking too long? The long parts that can be controlled seem to be:
* Heating water - bigger burner?
* Sparge/Lauter - Fly sparging takes longer than batch sparging. Full volume mash is fast too - aka no sparge.
* Getting to boiling - start heating the wort before you've collected it all.
* Chilling - The colder the water, the faster the chilling - consider using ice water. Stir the wort occasionally if using an immersion chiller. Look into no-chill brewing.
* Cleanup - clean as you go. Don't take more crap out than you need.

I like doing no sparge on smaller beers. I don't have a HLT, so it allows me to get the wort into the kettle faster and moves things along.
 
Whutever said:
I measure the water and hops (vacuum packed of course) the night before and set everything out that I need (that can be). This includes grinding the grain ahead of time. This combined with batch sparging has reduced my brew days to ~5 hours if I'm on my game and don't have to make any repairs during the brew session.
Click to expand...

Similar to my brewday except I measure hops during the mash to give me something to do. The only PIA part for me is cleaning the mash tun and getting rid of the grains. When it gets warm out, it gets iffy fast because my typical brewday is the day AFTER garbage collection. I wish I still lived in a rural setting where I could ditch it anywhere and be done.
 
I do no sparge, overnight mash and no chill. I have 2 kids and I like to play golf. 6 hour brew days don't work for me.
 
I cut some annoying time out of my brew day by not siphoning from kettle to fermentor. I don't have a spigot on my kettle so after chilling I would have to siphon to my fermentor after waiting for the trub to settle out. Watching, watching, watching for the line between beer and trub, then trying to get that last bit. The last time, I picked up the kettle and dumped it all in the fermenter, shake, pitch, done.
 
My typical brew day takes 4 hours for a 10 gallon batch (have dedicated HLT, MLT, Brew Kettle, and march pump) from start-up to clean up. I weigh and crush grains while the strike water is heating up. I heat up about 10 gallons total with my strike water so I can use 5 gallons of hot water to soak with star san in my keg fermenter during the brewing process. Start heating my wort after the first run-off. Clean the mash tun while wort is getting to boil temp. 15 minutes after boil to run wort into fermenter through counter-flow chiller. Clean-up after that is about 20 minutes from the counterflow and brew kettle.
 
Save time and labor...40 minute mash, 40 minute boil...no chill in the kettle, then here is the kicker...pitch yeast and ferment in the kettle...7-10 days rack to a keg and let sit / secondary in the keg for another week or two...cheers!
 
I really enjoy making the whole brew day more and more efficient. Its just another aspect of the hobby in general that I really enjoy. I understand some people like to take their time, but the OP was asking advice on how to shave some time off of the brew day, not whether he should take his time and enjoy the brew day like 'some' other homebrewers like to.

The biggest thing that has helped me do 5g brews in 4 hours is cleaning while other parts of the process are going on. If after transferring your wort to the fermentor all you have to do is clean your chiller and kettle, then you will save a ton of time. Just don't clean during the brew day when something is waiting, for example don't clean the mash tun when the wort is done boiling and you haven't started the chiller yet. I've also started to measure out and boil the mash/sparge water in the morning well before I need it. By the time I am ready to brew, if the water is too hot then its easy to cool, if the water is too cool then it shouldn't take too much time heating it up. It takes 5 minutes to measure out and start boiling the water at 8am, then make sure to turn it off when it starts to boil, then you can come back a few hours later and start the brew day.

Cheers!
 
jglazer said:
I've also started to measure out and boil the mash/sparge water in the morning well before I need it. By the time I am ready to brew, if the water is too hot then its easy to cool, if the water is too cool then it shouldn't take too much time heating it up. It takes 5 minutes to measure out and start boiling the water at 8am, then make sure to turn it off when it starts to boil, then you can come back a few hours later and start the brew day.

Cheers!
Click to expand...

Similar to what I did last weekend. I prepared smaller (12qt) pots with water since it takes a while to come out of the filtered water faucet. I then heated it up on the kitchen stove since natural gas is much cheaper than propane. One of the pots fits nicely into a styrofoam box that we got a Honeybaked Ham in a while back so it loses only little heat. During the mash I prepare the sparge water the same way. I usually also clean "on the fly" but my brewing setup doesn't allow for much cleaning until all is done. I like to completely drain the mash so the grains are less soaked.
 
When I brew, 90% of the time it's in the evenings, with the bulk of it after i put the kids to bed. I try to weigh and mill grains the day before, as well as weigh out hops, then number the zip locks i put the hops into according to their hop addition. I can do all that in the living room with kids running around. it only takes them one bite on a magnum hop pellet to leave me alone to my thing.

My average schedule:
~7:30pm - setup burner, BK, add water to BK, fire it up
~8:15pm - add strike water to mash tun, then get one of the kids to stir while i add grains (they argue about who gets to stir, and I let them)
~9:15pm - stir up the mash tun, vorlauf, and collect first runnings. Fire up burner while collecting runnings
~9:30pm - batch sparge (and vorlauf), collect rest of wort
~10:00pm - usually starts to boil. While the boil is going on, I clean up the mash tun, dump the spent grains in a bucket to give to farmer for feed, sanitize fermenter and hose to drain to fermenter, clean up other things if necessary. I don't usually crack a beer until the boil is well under way.
~11:00pm - chill wort (IC).
~11:30pm - fill up fermenters with liquid gold, aerate while filling it up, pitch yeast.
~12:00am - scrub brew kettle and clean up.
~12:15am - go to bed.
About 5 hours for a 10 gallon batch. shave off about 30 minutes for a 5 gallon batch.
 
squeekybobo said:
I can do all that in the living room with kids running around. it only takes them one bite on a magnum hop pellet to leave me alone to my thing.
Click to expand...

We need a video of that. ;)

I just recently finished building a single-vessel recirculating BIAB electric system and brewed on it for the first time yesterday. Previously, an AG batch (cooler mash tun, double batch sparge) would easily take me 5.5 hrs if all went well. Yesterday was about 4.25 hours with me spending some extra time getting used to the system. The 5500W 240V element certainly heats faster than my old 30,000 btu propane burner and reaching/holding precise mash temp is as easy as setting the value on the PID controller.
 

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