two brew day?

I am low on beer and need to do a double brew day. Does anyone have any tips on speeding on doing two 5 gal batches in one day?

I usually do two at a time. I get one batch in the mash tun and heat the water for the second batch. Then I boil the wort from the first batch while mashing the second.

I've been doing two 5 gallon batches in a day by finding two beers with similar profiles and doing a single large mash. I catch the first running in 2 buckets and then I batch sparge and collect the 2nd running into 2 more buckets. I check the gravities and then combine the runnings so each beer has the right pre-boil volume and gravity, using the dilution tool in Beersmith. I steep specialty grains on the side and add them to the respective brews. I boil each successively while i clean up the mash mess and sanitize the carboys.

It's fun to try to figure out 2 beers with similar enough bases that you only need to steep 1 or 2 specialty grains.

Here are a few of the combos I've come up with:

Cream ale & Australian lager
Marzen & California common
Belgian golden strong & French saison
Kolsch & Dortmunder
American amber & English IPA
Northern German alt & helles bock

Having enough equipment is really the key to speed. My brew buddy and I have nearly the exact same setup, so I always have double the gear on hand. If you have a friend who can come by in exchange for beer, go with that. I find when brewing solo, that my mash time is usually just as long as my sparge and boil time. So if you're doing a mash in a cooler, you're going to have to wait for your sparge to finish before you can double back to start another brew. If you have only one burner, this can be a problem, too. I suspect that doubling your brew would add about 2/3-3/4 of the time of a typical brew session to your day. If you only have the one burner, I would recommend gathering your water for your second mash and heating accordingly, then start the boil on your first batch. If it mashes longer due to time constraints, so be it.

Oh, the things we do for beer. Good luck!