mwill07
Well-Known Member
I just finished my second AG batch (after about 4 years of extract brewing). Brewday took too long - it was about 8 hours for me, start to end of clean-up. I had a few hiccups along the way, but in general, the process took too long.
Issues:
1. This was a fairly big beer for a 5G mash tun. 11 lbs of grain, target OG = 1.066, which pushes the limits of my tun. To make sure my efficiency was as high as I needed it to be, I did 2 sparges.
2. for some reason, the infusion temp was dropping faster than I expected. I was losing about a degree every 20 minutes. To ensure full conversion, I let it sit 15-20 minutes extra long to make sure everything had enough time to do it's stuff.
3. I ended up with 7 gallons in the pot. This took a long time to heat up, and then it seemed to take forever to boil down to 5 gallons. I was supposed to do a 90 minute boil, but it ended up around 115 minutes until flame off.
If I'm going to keep doing AG, I've got to figure out how to make this process work faster. What do you do to make brew day move faster?
Couple things I'm pondering:
1. get a bigger tun so I can hit my full 6.5 gallon volume with one sparge.
2. use my current 5 gal tun as a HLT so I can get my sparge water to temp and hold it there during the initial infusion hold.
3. fly sparging - any benefit in terms of time? a HLT would tie in nicely with fly sparging.
4. cooling - I got down to pitching temp in about 30 minutes or so using a standard immersion chiller. How can this be improved?
What else do you do to speed things up? What's a reasonable amount of time for a full 5G AG brew day?
Issues:
1. This was a fairly big beer for a 5G mash tun. 11 lbs of grain, target OG = 1.066, which pushes the limits of my tun. To make sure my efficiency was as high as I needed it to be, I did 2 sparges.
2. for some reason, the infusion temp was dropping faster than I expected. I was losing about a degree every 20 minutes. To ensure full conversion, I let it sit 15-20 minutes extra long to make sure everything had enough time to do it's stuff.
3. I ended up with 7 gallons in the pot. This took a long time to heat up, and then it seemed to take forever to boil down to 5 gallons. I was supposed to do a 90 minute boil, but it ended up around 115 minutes until flame off.
If I'm going to keep doing AG, I've got to figure out how to make this process work faster. What do you do to make brew day move faster?
Couple things I'm pondering:
1. get a bigger tun so I can hit my full 6.5 gallon volume with one sparge.
2. use my current 5 gal tun as a HLT so I can get my sparge water to temp and hold it there during the initial infusion hold.
3. fly sparging - any benefit in terms of time? a HLT would tie in nicely with fly sparging.
4. cooling - I got down to pitching temp in about 30 minutes or so using a standard immersion chiller. How can this be improved?
What else do you do to speed things up? What's a reasonable amount of time for a full 5G AG brew day?