BeerBorg

MrBandGuy wrote:

berryman wrote:

MrBandGuy wrote:Yea, Finished everything, including cleanup in under 3 hours with kids still in pjs. It was all good!
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WOW. you have to share your technics. A brewday for me is a whole brew day, no matter if extract or AG...

Once I get time, I'll go through it for you for sure.


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For me, the day before I get my RO water started, weigh the grain and mill it (put it in an airtight container overnight) and get my hops ready. The next day, brew day, from start to finish cleaning, is usually only 4 hours for me, including cleaning. There's not much to do during the 60 minute mash so I clean up a bit, same with the boil. While I'm waiting for it to reach a boil, I'm cleaning up the grain and saving time as I go.
I've heard podcasts where many only do a 30-40 mash and the same for a boil saving 30 minutes or so. You likely won't get the same conversion but many do this with much success.

Beer-lord wrote: For me, the day before I get my RO water started, weigh the grain and mill it (put it in an airtight container overnight) and get my hops ready. The next day, brew day, from start to finish cleaning, is usually only 4 hours for me, including cleaning. There's not much to do during the 60 minute mash so I clean up a bit, same with the boil. While I'm waiting for it to reach a boil, I'm cleaning up the grain and saving time as I go.
I've heard podcasts where many only do a 30-40 mash and the same for a boil saving 30 minutes or so. You likely won't get the same conversion but many do this with much success.

I take a similar approach, but a little simpler. I don't build my water, and just use filtered tap water. I do get the amount I'll be using in the pot the night before. If I'm doing a PM, I mill the grains, but I've been doing a lot of all extract batches lately for a variety of reasons. I decide on the hops I'll be using and take them out of the freezer.

On brew day, if I'm doing a PM, I heat the water while I'm making and eating breakfast (or lunch), start the mash and make a costco run (sometimes combined with a trip to the pool for a workout). When I get back, the mash is done. If I don't do a mash, I just bring the water to a boil, turn the heat off and add the LME for the boil.

At that point (whether PM or extract), I add the hops and bring it to a boil. I add the hops before it's boiling because I figure that can help with getting a little more extraction. I could probably get even a little more if I had the hops in the mash, but I used the spent grains in dog biscuits for years and even though my dog died, I leave them out due to force of habit (and I may start making biscuits again because I have a bunch of neighbors with dogs).

If I'm doing an abbreviated boil, I use more hops and a shorter boil. I've got a wort chiller, but I usually just use an ice slurry in my sink (I'm trying to conserve water and my recirculating pump died). I also fill several ziplock snack bags with water and freeze them the night before. I add them to the pot to speed cool down time.

I'm not sure how long my brew days are, but they're definitely just a few hours.

When I am doing a PM lately what I actually do is mash twice as much as I need (or even more) and then boil it for a bit then cool and split it into 2 or 3 or 4 containers. IE as much as a full 4 gallon BIAB mash worth of it. I use some of it the next day or two in whatever I was going to make, and then freeze the rest in my chest freezer. I then will thaw and use the rest as I wish as a PM base for other future batches. So I do one long brew day and get a bunch of short brew days out of it later.

I've got a couple containers of a Malted Oat, Flaked Oat, Malted Wheat, Flaked Barley, 2 Row PM sitting in my freezer right now that I'll use soon for something (was the PM base for the "Karmelite Single" wit beer like thing I made with the New Nordic yeast).

I've been doing this for more then a year now and always had great results, so I'll keep doing it. Sometimes I even boil a bittering charge into the PMs and then calculate the IBUs contributions of the split batches, so I get my bittering charge out of the way.

Also, I do a lot of short boils with high AA hops with a similar profile to whatever the finishing hops would normally be. IE say I have a Saison or Belgian recipe that wants a small bittering charge, and then streisselspalt or similar hops at the end. Those are like 2-3% AA normally. I will take that recipe and substitute 11-12% French Aramis hops, throw them in at the same point in the boil, or maybe split it and put a bit in earlier, and the rest at the same point, but forgo the bittering charge. If done right you get very similar profile, but you can cut your boil time down to 10 or 15 minutes, especially if doing PM/Extract (my view is that you can probably pull it off for AG too, or maybe do a 20-30 minute boil... based on various experiments folks have done, just pitch enough yeast that you get a vigorous fermentation to scrub off any DMS). This also keeps your extract from darkening much if at all, so if you use good fresh stuff you can end up with a beer that actually looks like an AG beer if you care about such things.

I can tell you that I've boiled the PMs I talked about above for 10 minutes only and then even NO CHILLED them overnight, and then boiled the resulting beer later for 10 minutes only and never had DMS issues, but I do pitch a hella lot of yeast. The experiments I've read with AG short boils, nobody ended up with DMS from the short boils either. All the experimenters did pitch decent sized starters though, so YMMV if you just chuck a vial into 5 gallons...

Made/bottled vanilla cream soda with the youngest yesterday. Not a beer, but the closest I've been to brewing in months...

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I bottled a 5G Irish Red Ale recipe from Northern Brewer and then brewed a 2G Wicked Irish Stout and a 2G Black Bishop Dopplebock from BrewDemon.

Kegged 5 gallons of Bela's IPA. I'm force carbing it hoping to have it drinkable Tuesday as I have a friend coming in town. Drinking Bela with Bella. That'd be cool.

I bottled my Wheat Saison with the Saison blend, that tasted nice, some fruit, some spice, some bubblegum, some tartness.

I also bottled the Raisin dubbel based on the Raison D'Etre recipe but not as strong and with one of the SA hops that sounded similar enough. That beer also tasted good but a lot drier and more tart then real Raison D'Etre, but that makes sense and is OK by me. Also thought I was going to have a spigot clog, but that actually didn't happen, the "mini cooper" spigots are a lot bigger then the old LBK/LBC ones, it takes a lot to clog them it seems.

But friendly reminder... little chopped up raisins apparently rehydrate into very large hunks of grapes... who would have thunk LOL. So what did happen is I got large raisin chunk floaters in pretty much all my bottles. Some bottles just one or two, but the last couple have something like a dozen. I could have stopped bottling when I got near the floating mass of raisin's but why waste beer I thought. But I think I will drink those first. I might have to pour these thorough a little strainer into my glass though. Or just pick out them and eat them first? We will see.

Supposedly the raisins add complexity, so maybe they will keep doing it in the bottle.

That or some wild yeast or bug that lived inside them and didn't die in the 10 minutes they were boiled will wake up and do something really fun.

Last night after cleaning out my taps and beer lines I tapped my first American Porter. I made a tincture using 1.5 ounces of bourbon and 2 vanilla beans for 5 days and dumped it into one 5 gallon keg. Both beers tasted great, the other keg has no flavor additions, just the straight up American Porter recipe. Upon further analysis to be conducted over the weekend, I may add a little more bourbon, we'll see.

I brewed a hef today, no matter what I try and how prepared I am it still takes me about 5 hours from start to finish & with clean up, cool down was slow today. My tap water is at 67 deg. now and my basement temp is at 78. I pitched at 67 and already climbing. What I wanted anyways because going to ferment this at room temp. but wanted to start it a little lower and let it go up.

berryman wrote:I brewed a hef today, no matter what I try and how prepared I am it still takes me about 5 hours from start to finish & with clean up, cool down was slow today. My tap water is at 67 deg. now and my basement temp is at 78. I pitched at 67 and already climbing. What I wanted anyways because going to ferment this at room temp. but wanted to start it a little lower and let it go up.

This is why in the summer especially I often brew a smaller volume more concentrated wort, and then top up in the fermenter with ice water, even if I don't have to. IE I could brew a 3 gallon batch, full volume, but instead I'll do it as 2 and then top up or do it as 3.75ish gallon concentrated wort and top up to 5 +. I can spend less time cooling and get to pitching temps faster that way.

This is a biggish deal for me due to my Brett, longer cooling with a chiller is just is more time for an infection to happen... but saving time is also good.

I have never had any issues with this, it still makes really nice beer.

And yes you can do it that way AG and still top up (I hear people all the time saying you can only do AG with full volume, this is well... BS). Your just mashing and boiling a more concentrated wort that's all. You may just need to adjust your bittering hops slightly because of this.

Not that BMC type beers are good to my tastes, but the are consistent... and many of them do a higher gravity boil and then dilute too from what I understand, because it makes their equipment, power/fuel costs less expensive.

Got my porter finishing up right now. Pretty happy with my pipeline now that i'm 3 months back into the hobby.

Just finished up my annual Wet hop Harvest ale. My Chinook went crazy this year, yielding 17.1 oz! Got another 3.75 from the Cascades too.

I threw them all in today's brew, only using pellets for a FWH and at flameout. I'll have either a delicious Chinook ale, or a grassy mess. We'll see in a few weeks!

I brewed up a 3 gallon Patersbier/Belgian Single with WLP 530, except I used Citra hops instead of "normal" ones, and did it as a single addition late hop w/hop stand. I used some of the left over mashed oat/wheat/flaked stuff that I have in my freezer as a PM base, and MoreBeer Pils to make up the gravity difference.

That wasn't actually the plan, but the plan changed when I boiled over the pot and spent 20 minutes cleaning it up. I had the Citra around, it is theoretically 13% AA, so I just used it to save time boiling and regain my 20 minutes.

Unless you don't like Citra, it will be yummy even if it doesn't taste "correct".

I bottled the Plum Saison w/Nelson Sauvin hops all late/hopstand.

It tasted Wowie Zowie!

Bottled the Belgian Patersbier/Single where I ended up tossing in Citra as a single late addition to save time instead of doing a long boil with other hops due to various problems such as cleaning up boil over mess. It tasted good out of the fermenter, so it's going to be a fine beer to drink even if it's "weird".