luckybeagle
Making sales and brewing ales.
Brulosophy has a great podcast and article about Short and Shoddy brewing methods that I've been thinking about lately. He extensively covers shortened boils (even using pilsner malt in a SMASH beer). They also have one about lonnnng mashes (I think 16 hours) and the relative inability of his testers to pick out the long vs 1 hour mashed beer (other than poor head retention). This got me thinking about ways to potentially reduce the amount of time I spend socked away in the garage while my wife and two young daughters (age 4 and a preemie) attempt to peacefully coexist
Since it's important to keep a (medically necessitated) supply of good homebrew on hand, without having it consume 4-5+ hours of my time during the day, here's what I've come up with for my 3-Vessel e-Herms setup:
The night before:
Overall I am estimating this brew will only keep me in the garage for ~ 1 hour. Everything else runs mostly on autopilot. None of this time is during waking ours for my daughters, and it pulls minimal time away from my wife.
I know this is not using my setup to its potential, but time is more precious than a few extra bucks lost to poorer efficiency.
I will try this tonight/tomorrow with a Belgian Golden Strong.
Can anyone think of a more efficient way to do this?
Since it's important to keep a (medically necessitated) supply of good homebrew on hand, without having it consume 4-5+ hours of my time during the day, here's what I've come up with for my 3-Vessel e-Herms setup:
The night before:
- 10:00pm: Mill the grains, weigh hops and adjuncts, and fill the HLT and MLT. The HLT is simply to operate the herms coil overnight to keep the mash temperature consistent. Fire up the heating element to mash temperature (not strike temperature as it'll ultimately equalize, and cooling down the HLT to target temperature takes extra time). Add brewing salts and go inside for ~15 minutes.
- 10:30pm: dough in at full volume for what will be a NO SPARGE mash and begin recirculating to hold the target mash temp. Go to bed.
- 5:00am: Kids aren't up yet. Go to the garage and quickly drain MLT to BK. As soon as heating element is covered with wort, initiate the boil. Quickly clean out the MLT and put away.
- 5:20am: Should now be up to a boil. Start that 30 minute boil timer and boil hard as an insurance policy to drive off any DMS (Brulosophy had none detected and I use highly modified MFB Pilsner malt as my base malt for most of my Belgian/German beers). Go inside and have a cup of coffee.
- 5:50am: knock out, whirlpool and chill. I can get to pitching temperatures within about 15 minutes. I've repurposed my plate chiller to recirculate back into the BK. I know it's mimicking an immersion chiller, but it allows me to walk away without fiddling with the flow.
- 6:05am: drain BK to fermenter, pitch the yeast, throw it in the fermentation fridge.
- 6:15am: clean the BK and put everything away.
- 6:30am: come in and get started on pancakes.
Overall I am estimating this brew will only keep me in the garage for ~ 1 hour. Everything else runs mostly on autopilot. None of this time is during waking ours for my daughters, and it pulls minimal time away from my wife.
I know this is not using my setup to its potential, but time is more precious than a few extra bucks lost to poorer efficiency.
I will try this tonight/tomorrow with a Belgian Golden Strong.
Can anyone think of a more efficient way to do this?