mgregg
Well-Known Member
edit-title should have said brew day, not brewery. Damn auto-correct
My wife gave birth to our first son on Jan 6th. Right after I received my new catalyst fermentor and dark star2 burner in the mail. Raising a newborn has been tougher and more time consuming then I expected, and since I'm working while my wife stays home I haven't been able to tell her to watch Robby for 5 hours so I can brew on a weekend. Until now...
Here's my plan- Doing a no-sparge english mild spread out over 2 days. Saturday night. Wife and baby went to bed at 8. Fired up the new burner and started heating 8.75 gallons of water to mash with. This went a lot faster with a 55,000 btu burner instead of my old method of using the 19,000 btu stove top burner. Right now I'm halfway through my full volume mash. As soon as that's done I'll drain it off into my boil pot and let it sit until morning.
Tomorrow morning I'll boil it and chill it if I have time to. If not, I'll let it sit and cool all day until wife and kid go to bed then rack it into the fermentor and pitch my yeast. I'm figuring on 1.5 hours tonight and 2 hours tomorrow.
I hope it works. I've always batch sparged and I haven't tried no chill cooling since I made the leap to AG a couple years ago. I've never made my wort and boiled the next day either. Lots of new variables so I stuck with a NB kit(added a pound of base malt to make up for an expected loss of efficiency with the no sparge). 3+ months without a brew day, I hope I've found a method that works with my much busier schedule these days.
My wife gave birth to our first son on Jan 6th. Right after I received my new catalyst fermentor and dark star2 burner in the mail. Raising a newborn has been tougher and more time consuming then I expected, and since I'm working while my wife stays home I haven't been able to tell her to watch Robby for 5 hours so I can brew on a weekend. Until now...
Here's my plan- Doing a no-sparge english mild spread out over 2 days. Saturday night. Wife and baby went to bed at 8. Fired up the new burner and started heating 8.75 gallons of water to mash with. This went a lot faster with a 55,000 btu burner instead of my old method of using the 19,000 btu stove top burner. Right now I'm halfway through my full volume mash. As soon as that's done I'll drain it off into my boil pot and let it sit until morning.
Tomorrow morning I'll boil it and chill it if I have time to. If not, I'll let it sit and cool all day until wife and kid go to bed then rack it into the fermentor and pitch my yeast. I'm figuring on 1.5 hours tonight and 2 hours tomorrow.
I hope it works. I've always batch sparged and I haven't tried no chill cooling since I made the leap to AG a couple years ago. I've never made my wort and boiled the next day either. Lots of new variables so I stuck with a NB kit(added a pound of base malt to make up for an expected loss of efficiency with the no sparge). 3+ months without a brew day, I hope I've found a method that works with my much busier schedule these days.
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