What's the most effective thing for shortening a brew day?

[dbrewski]

It's your choice of course, but if you read the page, it detailed exactly how lead gets into your water even from new pipes and fixtures. And attorneys are involved in this how? It's a document released by the FDA for the protection of people's health.

Hopefully everyone is clear on the health risks of lead, there is no threshold under which lead exposure is safe, ya da, ya da, feel free to ignore if you feel the FDA is in cahoots with evil lawyers to scare you away from that delicious lead-free hot water.

 

[Snicks]

I shorted my cooling time this past summer by buying a $60 1/8hp sump pump to serve the same purpose as a pre-chiller. Big rubbermaid full of tap water that I slowly fill during the boil. I pump the water through the IC and save it do some laundry or for clean-up. Once the water level is down to a few inches in the tub, the wort is ~25C so I add ice to it and let it recirculate. It happened to be cheaper and less equipment to store then a pre-chiller for me and works fantastic.

I also would recommend against using hot water from the tap, last time I replaced my water tank the amount of thick rust water that drained out was pretty gross. Perhaps split your mash water into 2 pots and heat it on two different burners?

 

[Saxomophone]

The thing I have done to make my brew day seem shorter is to incorporate it into my every day stuff. I put strike water on in the morning when I'm doing other things and mash before lunch. Sometimes it will sit for 3 or 4 hours before I get to sparge but I don't lose much heat. I heat sparge water again while taking care of other things that need to be done then take about an hour to sparge. I let the wort sit till dinner time when I turn on the burner to get it going. By the time dinner is done and the kids are in bed I have a boiling pot of wort on the burner ready to go. All I have to do is boil, cool, and clean up. Works well for when I want to do a longer boil because I just turn on the burner when dinner is cooking to add an hour or so.

I actually get done later at night if I do extract because I have to steep the grains and get the wort boiling again after adding the extract.