Unless the brew day is what you enjoy most, there is no reason you should not easily be able to pull off a double brew in less than 4-5 hours if you plan and do your prep work accordingly. Since you already have a second pot and burner, you don’t need anything else. All I use is a 15 gallon brew kettle and a turkey frier pot. Not sure how big it is, maybe 7 gallons to the top?
I’ll start preparing for the brewday the night before. I’ll clean up and set up the garage Friday evening. Sometimes I’ll premeasure my water and label those in food-grade buckets. I’ll get all the things squared away in BrewSmith and set out my computer etc. Essentially I try to get everything done so that the only thing I have to do Saturday morning is pour in the water and fire up the burner. Having all the carboys cleaned and ready really goes a long ways.
I’ll start off with the first brew and get it going as normal. As soon as the grains are mashed in, I’m heating sparge water and getting that portion ready. After you start your boil for batch #1, go ahead and be heating your strike water up for batch #2. Depending on your mash times, I’ve found that if I mash for the following batch in about 30 minutes into the boil, the following batch will be just coming ready to vorlof.
Just keep in mind, this assumes you run into no problems with the boil, racking etc. You might shoot to mash in about 45 min into the boil to give yourself a bit of breathing room at the end. After I finish racking the kettle into the carboy, I’ll spray the pot out real fast and start vorlof. You can do it sooner in a bucket if you wish, but you’ll run the risk of task loading yourself if you don’t watch out. While the second batch is sparging, I’ll be flowing some O2 and pitching the yeast of the previous batch and using the downtimes to keep caught up on notes. Don’t forget to just chill out when you can, catch your breath and take a breather. Put some tunes on, watch TV etc. You’ll appreciate these lil moments later.
The only real thing I suggest is get a cpl clip boards and print off your brew notes from BrewSmith so that you can write on them as you do things. It helps me to keep these separated as I’ve already made the mistake of writing data down on the wrong sheets. Essentially, I’ll write in my actual temps and volumes compared to my target numbers. This will help when keying this information into your software and making adjustments to gravity or boil volumes.
I guess the only thing that I have found that will make your day go by smoother is try to get the prep work done the night before. Having those items off your back really makes the day go by smoother and seems to set the pace for a better day. I’ll say from bad experience when you start your day late with having to rack beer to free up carboy space, or pull and set up equipment, it just adds to the rush.
This past Saturday, I was able to brew three back to back batches with one of them being a 11 gallon batch. I started the brew day at 0600 and wrapped up the day at 7PM. This included washing everything, putting everything away, and moping the two car garage out. Try to keep things clean as you go. By the time you get ready to rack to the carboy, the only thing left to wash should be your brew kettle and your chiller. I’m sure there are others who can do this much faster, but I don’t yet have any pumps and have to utilize the KISS technique as much as possible.
I have a no thrill brewroom. Chances are, you have everything I have in this picture so there is no reason you can't easily pull off a double brew or more and still have plenty of time for your family.
Good luck buddy.
I do have a cereal killer maybe I can tighten the crap out of that and see if I can try your method. Do you do an iodine test since you mash for such a short time? And does that time really allow all the sugars and flavor a to be pulled from the malt? Unfortunately a plate chiller is out of my budget right now:/
