What saves time on brew day?

[mikescooling]

What saves time on brew day?
I crank my water heater up to super hot. What do you do?

 

[OkashiiBrew]

Set up for brewing the night before. Pre measure your water (I use spare carboys). Weigh out grain. Double check that you have all you need to brew to avoid changing the recipe at the last minute.

 

[RachmaelBenApplebaum]

Clean as you go, it's take the runoff and wiat for the wort to reach boiling with a pint, or continue enjoying pints while the wort cools, but it's valuable time you could spend cleaning the mash tun, excess utensils etc.

 

[jaydog2314]

I clean all 3 vessels the night before as well as weigh and mill my grains the night before. I make sure that everything I need is in a spare bucket or in the sink so I have to do is fill up the sink and clean. I made myself a checklist too so that I can clean as I go and save time. I used to clean everything first and I was sitting around waiting for wort to boil! Went from 8-9 hours to 6 from heating strike to complete clean up.

 

[Dirty25]

Use extract...on a more serious note using a good burner to get you to boiling quick and sparge temps fast saves a lot of time.

 

[AnOldUR]

I clean all 3 vessels the night before . . . I used to clean everything first and I was sitting around waiting for wort to boil! Went from 8-9 hours to 6 from heating strike to complete clean up.

So, you use to spend 2-3 hours cleaning your HLT, MLT and Kettle BEFORE you started brewing? Sometimes I might clean my kettle the next day, but most of my stuff is cleaned and stored before the boil is over. If you clean after use, there's no reason to do it again before starting your next brewday.

 

[kombat]

Draw your strike & sparge water from the hot water faucet instead of starting with cold.

Get a good burner and crank it up high while heating (throttle it back once you reach your strike water temperature or boil).

Get a good plate chiller, use pre-chilled water. I immerse my old copper coil IC in a camping cooler full of water and frozen Gatorade bottles. The output of that chiller becomes the input to my plate chiller. I can get 5 gallons of boiling wort down to 60°F in 15 minutes.

Prep the night before (weigh out grains, crush up Campden tablet, move equipment to garage).

Do double batches (10g instead of 5g), or brew twice in one day, back to back. I can do one 5 gallon batch in 5 hours, or two 5 gallon batches in 7 hours. Only 2 more hours for twice the beer. You need a second burner for this though (you heat the strike water for the second mash while you start boiling the runnings from the first batch).

Clean as you go. Multitask. Start rehydrating the yeast while the wort is still boiling, so it'll be already ready to go when your wort is cooled and aerated.

 

[924RACR]

Partigyle - 15 gal instead of 5 or 10, in only a bit more time!

Our big bottleneck now is chill time, using hose water and copper coil; we need to change that to a recirc of ice water bath.

Going to the big banjo burner saved big time and gas. Cleaning while we boil/chill, and bottling the previous week's batch helps too.

 

[bumstigedy]

Setting up as much as possible the night before and cleaning as I go are the two biggest time savers for me. I'm looking forward to some good tips from others though.

 

[Soup4you2]

- stage the equipment the night before
- crush the grains the night before
- get the mash water under flame ASAP.. while waiting on it to reach strike temp, start prepping everything else.
- Clean as you go..

 

[billybryson54]

My brew day is typically every Sunday, and I generally start at 7AM. My biggest time saver is that I use a heatstick plugged into a timer, so when I go into my brewing area at 7, my strike water is already at about 150ish. HUGE time saver...

 

[cfonnes]

Draw your strike & sparge water from the hot water faucet instead of starting with cold.

With all of the information out there telling us that we should not use water from the water heater to cook with I am surprised that anyone is brave enough to brew with it.

 

[Spartan1979]

Fermcap. It allows me to get most of my cleaning done while the wort is boiling.

 

[tmac2050]

With all of the information out there telling us that we should not use water from the water heater to cook with I am surprised that anyone is brave enough to brew with it.

Links? I've never heard this before.

If I didn't use 120deg water from the HWH, I'd add at least an hour to my brew days.

 

[grathan]

Not looking at it as "a brew day" ,but rather something that I am doing in the background. If the mash has to sit 3 hours while I run to town then so be it.

 

[zeekage]

Links? I've never heard this before.

If I didn't use 120deg water from the HWH, I'd add at least an hour to my brew days.

If I fill up my mash tun (HD orange drink cooler. key part is it's white inside) with HOT water from the tap it is noticeably yellow. I'm sure from all the sediment inside the water heater itself. That was enough to make me switch to cold water from the tap. I should note its an electric water heater.

A friend of mine, on the other hand, has one of the on demand ones that doesn't have a storage tank, so he cranks his up to like 140 on brew day and it works beautifully.

 

[cuda6pak]

FYI if anyone's using a carbon filter to filter out chlorine/chloramine it specifically says to use cool water instead of hot, and filter it slow.

 

[smyrnaquince]

With all of the information out there telling us that we should not use water from the water heater to cook with I am surprised that anyone is brave enough to brew with it.

Links? I've never heard this before.

If I didn't use 120deg water from the HWH, I'd add at least an hour to my brew days.

EPA

NY Times

Minnesota DoH

 

[MuddyCreek]

Again... what is this "speeding up the brewday" thing you speak of? Why would anyone want to finish early? Your brew day is YOUR brew day.

 

[freek]

EPA

NY Times

Minnesota DoH

Those links all refer to the risk of lead. I think if you take water directly from a modern water heater and pass it through a filter designed for hot water (say a DIY system based on a shower head filter), you should be fine.

 

[LandoLincoln]

Camlocks save a lot of time over using barbs and hose clamps.

 

[Evan_L]

the night before I weigh out all my hop additions, yeast nutrient, whirlfloc etc. into snack sized ziplocks and mark them with the time they get added, put them in order and then back in the freezer. Using a timer, once the hot break is over, I can safely walk away to clean out the mash tun etc. and add a baggie when the timer goes off.

Grains get crushed the night before and equipment is cleaned and ready. I usually leave all the small stuff like siphon, hoses, bucket lids sitting in the sanitizer overnight so I can just pull them out when needed the next day.

Everything such as buckets (covered and prefilled with the correct water amounts) and the burner is set up in the garage in place.

I double check all my ingredients so there are no last minute LHBS trips mid boil.

There is a limit to how much time you can shave off, you can't make water boil or speed up time. Always ask yourself, could I have done this beforehand, what can I do while waiting. My first few brew days were long as hell because I would sit and stare at the pot while it boiled. Now there is no down time and they go much quicker. At about 5.5 hours for most brew days, i'm happy and don't bother trying to speed it up any more, it should still be fun, not work.

 

[kombat]

With all of the information out there telling us that we should not use water from the water heater to cook with I am surprised that anyone is brave enough to brew with it.

Why not? What are the potential hazards? What "information" is out there?

 

[kombat]

EPA

That article is 20 years old! Who has lead pipes anymore? They were banned 70 years ago!

 

[afr0byte]

Why not? What are the potential hazards? What "information" is out there?

I don't know about current hazards, but certainly getting it directly from the water heater makes it difficult to run through an RO system.

 

[progmac]

That article is 20 years old! Who has lead pipes anymore? They were banned 70 years ago!

lots of people still have lead service lines and in some cases city water mains.

 

[peterj]

lots of people still have lead service lines and in some cases city water mains.

In this case the lead would be in it before it ever got to the water heater and you would have the lead in your cold water too.

I just don't think the water is going to pick up that much lead (especially from my non-lead pipes) in between my water heater and the faucet. Maybe the water that's been sitting in the pipes would have a chance to dissolve some small amounts of lead that could be in the pipes, but that gets flushed out while I'm waiting for hot water. Sure I probably wouldn't make a baby's formula with hot water just to be safe, but I'm not planning on giving any of my beer to babies.

 

[peterj]

I like to heat the mashout water on the kitchen stove and the sparge water on the propane burner at the same time. It probably doesn't save that much time, but it makes me feel like I'm being efficient.

 

[FuzzeWuzze]

Draw your strike & sparge water from the hot water faucet instead of starting with cold.

I was under the impression you shouldnt use hot water directly from the tap for things like brewing, because that water has been potentially sitting in your hot water heater for weeks or months(assuming you have a 30-40Gallon Tank) and can get minerals and other off flavors from the tank from staying there so long.

 

[yewtah-brewha]

My brew day is typically every Sunday, and I generally start at 7AM. My biggest time saver is that I use a heatstick plugged into a timer, so when I go into my brewing area at 7, my strike water is already at about 150ish. HUGE time saver...

You my friend are 1 badass. I never thought about that. How long does it take. i.e what time do you plug it in?