Show Us Your Short-Cuts

[bob1852]

Mobile mashing. My pickup truck is my brewstand. A couple times I have filled up my cooler with water a little hotter than usual, and then drove to LHBS to buy my grains. I stirred in right there in their parking lot.

You too, huh?

 

[Scooby_Brew]

This is how I fly sparge without building a 3-tier system:

 

[Stuntman]

You too, huh?

Good idea, I just need to get the whole thing a few more inches off the ground, so that when wort is cool, I can then go from the Brew Kettle to the fermenter.

New shortcut : I was dealing with a stuck sparge AGAIN! I finally realized, one bag of rice hulls? I am doing a ten gallon batch. Put the second bag of rice hulls and I got a nice fast free flowing stream. .48 cents a bag, no headaches. Anyone know where to get them cheaper, as a Garbage bag full of rice hulls would be great.

Shortcut for today...Don't be like me, and keep you head out of your @ss.

 

[mrk305]

You too, huh?

That's awesome...
.... but I drive home and finish up in the carport

 

[curlyfat]

Here's my three-tier: Brew Stand.

My friend had some spare metal, so other than the burners, it cost me several pints of homebrew and an afternoon.

A great short-cut is to make friends with a welder who likes beer!

 

[Saint Aardvark]

Nowadays, I will go off and do other things around the house while mashing, sparging, boiling, etc. and let things take their natural course. I will check email, watch TV, do laundry, etc. Sometimes I will be finished pretty fast, and sometimes it will take me 6-7 hours to make a batch. Even if you're completely minimizing the time it takes to brew, for AG you've got at least a couple hours of downtime, so I just plan to be around and keep an eye on things, and not worry about rushing. I do the same thing when I bake bread.

I do the same -- I've got two boys, 4 & 2, so I'm w/them on the wkends. (one sleeping in my arms now!) Brewday stretches fr. 5:30am to around 4pm or so -- looooong mash, then boil/chill/cleanup during naptime.

 

[SC_Ryan]

Here's my three-tier: Brew Stand.

My friend had some spare metal, so other than the burners, it cost me several pints of homebrew and an afternoon.

A great short-cut is to make friends with a welder who likes beer!

Beautiful. That's about the most artful photograph I've ever seen of a brew stand too.

 

[Stuntman]

Here's my three-tier: Brew Stand.

My friend had some spare metal, so other than the burners, it cost me several pints of homebrew and an afternoon.

A great short-cut is to make friends with a welder who likes beer!

That looks good, it is exactly what I need. A little taller is the only thing I would change, so that there was room to gravity the wort through a chiller into primaries. heaviest thing to lift on brew day is the full primaries.

New short cut, for me that is....spending about a hundred on a chill plate.:rockin:

 

[aMillionDreams]

I also like to bake my own bread. I've found the crewing beer and baking bread go hand in hand, they both take the same time, they both center around yeast. So usually I use my down time waiting for boils to bake a loaf of bread. Yesterday I made a pot of chicken stock instead of bread.

 

[DavidP]

My biggest, most recent time-saver has been using a PID-controlled HLT. That gets set up first and heating while I get the rest of my equipment out.

But a tip for newer brewers? How about going for as clean a wort as possible in order to avoid a transfer to secondary.

 

[heywolfie1015]

For cooling wort to take accurate hydrometer readings:

Pour the hot wort sample into a pie tin or one of those cheap, disposable roasting tins. Put a bunch of ice cubes in the sink and set the tin on top of them. Move the wort back and forth in the tin. Should cool your wort down in under a minute.

Before learning this trick, I would be halfway through the boil before my wort was cool enough to tell me what the pre-boil OG was.

 

[weirdboy]

For cooling wort to take accurate hydrometer readings:

Pour the hot wort sample into a pie tin or one of those cheap, disposable roasting tins. Put a bunch of ice cubes in the sink and set the tin on top of them. Move the wort back and forth in the tin. Should cool your wort down in under a minute.

Before learning this trick, I would be halfway through the boil before my wort was cool enough to tell me what the pre-boil OG was.

I just use a refractometer...takes a few seconds. For pre-boil readings I will often take a hyrdometer sample at the same time, and stick it in the fridge, and then by the time the boil is wrapping up, the sample is cooled down to the right range. I basically just use it to validate my refractometer readings, though.