BeerBorg

I have a major time crunch tomorrow as I need to pack for a trip, clean a fermenting bucket, transfer into it so I can use the yeast cake, all the while sneaking in a brew session.

my wife may very well kill me!

here is the plan for the actual brew day:
- get about 4 gallons (stovetop BIAB here) heating up while I measure and crush my grains
- dough in and mash for 25 minutes while boiling a standard size teapot's worth of water
- mix that in and faux mash out for like 5 minutes while I measure out hop additions and heat up a little more water to about 165
- pull out the grain bag, rinse it with the 165 water, then let it drip out while the wort comes to a boil
- FWH and boil for 30 minutes
- cool with my immersion chiller for a few minutes (ground water temps are still around 78) to at least get under 100
- dump that on some ice cubes in the bucket to, hopefully, get the temp down in to the 70s
- pitch yeast and aerate
- clean up

in my head, I pull this off in about 2 hours. this is based on reading articles at brulosophy, BYO, and beersmith...and adapted to give a little more time at each step because I can't bring myself to cut corners more than this!

oh here you go for reference sake in a 4 gallon batch:
6 pounds pils malt (yup...PILS malt!)
1/2 lb wheat
1/4 c-75

FWH (30 min) - 1/2 oz Apollo
20 min - 1/2 oz Saphir and 1/4 Cascade
7 min - 1/4 oz each of Saphir and Cascade

should be roughly 5% abv and nearly 30 IBU for a nice golden APA

so am I crazy or what?

That'll work!

I mostly use Pils... It's a great base for many styles...

Although I like Munich and Marris Otter as well...

And I do a lot of 3 gallon PM's using my oven to hold temps...

Me? I'ld add more late hops as it cools just to punch up the hop presence...

But that's me wanting more hops.

Your beer, your preference, of course!

Cheers!

Although I've never tried that short of a boil with Pils, I've done it with other grains without trouble.

I do 3 gallon BIAB oven mashes like BigPapaG mentioned too.

I do all sorts of little things to shave time off of my brew day, and pretty much always end up making good beer.

Instead of ice cubes, what I tend to do is brew a more concentrated wort (higher OG / less volume), and then top up to intended volume with nearly frozen water. So say I am making a 3 gallon batch, in the summer I will often mash it as a stronger 2 gallon batch and then dilute with my ice water to top up to intended OG and finish the cooling. This gets cooling done faster in 2 ways, less initial thermal mass to cool, and the top up finishes it off. You don't change grain amounts, in BIAB you effectively just do a thicker mash instead of full volume.

yeah I like the idea of diluting the beer with the cold water as well...keeps it simple for sure.

gotta see if I can finagle enough space for a decent size container in the fridge!

and I've plowed through sack of munich, pale malt, 2-row, and now I am working on the pilsner. it is fun to see the changes you can get simply by changing the base malt. in all honesty, I was going to just get another 2-row sack, but the LHBS was having a sale on the pils, so I figured why the heck not? MO would be up there for sure, but it is a tad expensive...
although so worth it come to think of it. if I can be a good lil' brewer and clear my stock, I might do a whole wave of English styles. but WY 1968 + MO + American hops (in session style ales) = awesomeness, so I might not need to wait too much'

I will keep you guys posted, hopefully before my trip!

Welp...that didn't happen! Haha we had a party last night to go to, and then out to a bar after. Yadda yadda I did not get up in time! But I am going to try it out when I get back, so the experiment will happen

One way to speed up a brew day is to do an overnight mash. I don't have a link handy, but I read up on it a while ago and tried it a few times. The main reason I stopped is that I usually start a mash, then run errands and is ready when I get back.

Something I've been doing (for use in Partial Mash beers) is mash up 3 or 4 times the amount of some kind of PM base I can use in multiple beers, boiling it (sans hops or with just a bittering hop addition to get some base amount of IBUs) and then splitting the extra I'm not using in whatever batch I'm making between containers and freezing it. So then I can brew a bunch of beers using a mix of it and extract in the future in the same amount of time I'd spend on just an extract beer when I feel like I can't spend a lot of time. IE the stuff I called "monks juice" or "whatever juice" you might see in some of the recipes I posted. This works great, never had any issues with it. Turns one long brew day into 2 or 3 other short ones.

mashani wrote:Something I've been doing (for use in Partial Mash beers) is mash up 3 or 4 times the amount of some kind of PM base I can use in multiple beers, boiling it (sans hops or with just a bittering hop addition to get some base amount of IBUs) and then splitting the extra I'm not using in whatever batch I'm making between containers and freezing it. So then I can brew a bunch of beers using a mix of it and extract in the future in the same amount of time I'd spend on just an extract beer when I feel like I can't spend a lot of time. IE the stuff I called "monks juice" or "whatever juice" you might see in some of the recipes I posted. This works great, never had any issues with it. Turns one long brew day into 2 or 3 other short ones.

this is really neat idea! something to think about for sure

ok guys, I gave it a go last night after work (because a full on brew day after work has never quite worked out as it should...for whatever reason that may be), and all seemed to go well.

I used the recipe above and the numbers were basically on point. just shy of 4 gallons total, and it was 1.047 (shooting for 48) into the fermenter. so would I need to use more grain to get the same sugar extraction? NOPE!

half hour mash, heated to 165, let it sit for basically 2 minutes while I measured out the hops, then pulled the grains and tossed in the FWH. after it reached a nice rolling boil, set the timer for 30 minutes and off it went

time spent (including milling grains, heating water, cooling wort, getting it into the bucket) was somewhere in the 2:15-30 range. I forgot to actually set my stopwatch like a dum dum. and the biggest slowdown: cooling the wort with the TX warm ground water. the actual prep, mash and brew was probably more like 90-100 minutes.

not bad for a full (well for ME that is 4 gallons) all grain brew day

it looked, smelled, and tasted A-OK as well. let's see how this goes in about 2 weeks when I keg this mofo...stay tuned!

I love it. My typical BIAB 5 gallon day is about four hours. I'm not sure what my fastest grain day has been. I sometimes do extract+grain pretty quickly, party by steeping from cool to 170, or by steeping in another pot while boiling the extract, and adding the steep near the end.

oh if I haven't mentioned it, I am currently (since '09) BIAB-ing. I have a cooler mash tun, but I usually just don't bother with it. there was a minute where I contemplated doing some HUGE gravity beers or going up to 10 gallons or something, but neither of those things happened

*sidebar* good thing I didn't actually. I moved away from my beer drinkin' immediate family, and my in-laws and friends here don't help me hit the taps nearly as hard!

so yeah, having the grains in the bag and not having to transfer and whatnot speeds things up greatly too!
oh, and as an addition to the total time here, I have to finish cleaning up when I get home from work a bit still. so another 20 or so minutes should be added for fairness. BUT, if I had had a helping hand, that part would have been done within 5 minutes last night

going back north to visit my family for Thanksgiving, so I won't be kegging (considering crashing and gelatin though) until NEXT Tuesday. fingers still crossed a little, but I have high hopes

update time! will a small one at least. I finally just YESTERDAY got to kegging this son of a gun!
popped the lid open, and it looked and smelled like beer (smelled really nice actually), so I gave it a little taste annnnnnd...

nothing weird! woohoo!

just tasted like a nice, light and balanced APA with some sweet citrus and a touch of malt. granted it was flat, but I eagerly look forward to tapping this. my new bar build hit a snag when we hired "pros" to do the staining/finishing, and they messed up the top coat. everything is backed up almost 10 days now, and they are currently, as in right this moment, back in my house sanding and re-finishing. hopefully it is done today, tomorrow at the latest...because I do want the the new taps flowing for new years day.

crossing some fingers!

This sounds cool. I somehow missed the thread originally but read through with eager anticipation of hearing how it turns out in the end for you.

freaking bar STILL isn't finished. I really don't like having to rely on other people. I am on the verge of just shoving this in the fridge part and having at it.
must. resist...
need a keg to unveil the bar...
daaaaaaaaaaaah!