Shortening Brew Days

Modern life is jam-packed with stuff that needs doing. Interestingly, this gets claimed again and again by every generation. It’s right up there with complaints about the latest technology, high taxes, and the moral turpitude of the young. But it is true that our time seems to slip away effortlessly on a stream of insistent emails, never-ending home projects, or the demands of a well-rounded life. 

I argue that brewing provides a perfect chance to stop, quiet the brain, and putter for a few hours. Even so, I admit that the mismatch between time needed to brew and time I have to brew makes it hard to brew. If only there were ways to make your brew day as fast as listening to a whole book on 2x playback. Oh wait . . . there are!

Nota Bene: We’re not trying to lay out for you the absolute surefire way to be the Usain Bolt of brewing. We’re giving you ways to save time so you have more days to brew and putter — what could be better?

I Spent How Much Time Brewing?

It’s tempting to look at the brew day and think “well, I usually take X hours for a recipe that calls for an hour boil” But we know that there’s more time being spent on stuff outside of the recipe sheet’s “60-minute mash; 60-minute boil.” Where does the time go?

Improvements of the soul and of the brew deck start with honest introspection and note taking. Pro brewers use a brew log sheet with lines for recording the clock time and values for each step, major and minor (e.g., “Mash In,” “Mash Step 1 Finished,” “Vorlauf Started,” “Sparge Finished,” and so on). When you start or finish a step, take a moment, look at the nearest clock and jot down the time.

With notes in hand, you may be surprised at how much time gets lost in the day. How long does it take to gather water? To mill grain? Every action is a potential bottleneck. 

As you look at each step, think about what slows you down. Is there an easy solution? Don’t just look at places where a time change can be made, look deeper at equipment and process issues. Sometimes that looks like a simple recipe change. “Do I need to boil for 90 minutes? Or 60?” 

Example: Initially, Drew would boil all his Pilsner malt beers for 90 minutes because he wanted to avoid Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS). He doesn’t anymore because modern lager malts are more forgiving on that front. He still might boil for a longer time for flavor reasons, but not because of unconscious reflex. Denny has taken this further and brews 30-minute mash and boil batches if and when he needs a speedy day.

Sometimes it’s an equipment problem where you can trade money for improved efficiency and enjoyment.  

Example: Milling grain on Drew’s setup used to take FOREVER. About 30 minutes of struggle with the mill jamming and refusing to crush grain for a 5-gallon (19-L) batch. Drew took his failed stubborn fixes as a sign from the universe to upgrade the mill and ever since he flies through milling. Of course, an even bigger time savings could be buying pre-milled grain. If you do that, our recommendation would be to use it within a day or two of it being milled.

Sometimes it’s a mechanical change like improving your heating power so you’re no longer waiting an hour to come to a boil. Conversely, maybe you have the opposite problem and need to invest in better chilling because high tap water temperatures leave you waiting and waiting before you can safely pitch your yeast (see my process later in how I address this).

And then there’s all the “blank” time in brewing where the mantra of hard-nosed bosses comes to bear — “If you have time to lean, you’ve got time to . . .”. Always be cleaning (or prepping, or organizing, or recording data).

With the accounting work out of the way, let’s keep digging into shortening our brew days.

Simple Time Savers

With your bottlenecks identified, here are other simple changes that can make the time you spend brewing more compatible with a life that requires your presence. 

Splitting Ales

Back in my college days, I moonlighted as a cook to make folding money. If there’s one lesson you can take from the professional kitchen and apply to everyday life, it’s “do as much ahead of time as possible.” A restaurant doesn’t make you wait hours for a meal because the cooks chopped, prepped, and pre-cooked the menu before they opened. In the brewing world, you can also “chunk” your efforts into more palatable time blocks. Here’s how that looks:

The Night Before:

• Prep your ingredients, water, and gear.

– Weigh out and mill the grain bill.

– Clean and set up the brew system and fermenter.

– Fill your vessels with the needed volume of de-chlorinated water. Add recipe calculated amounts of acid and water salts.

– Prep the yeast starter (if using).

– Set timers, if available, to heat the water just ahead of your start time.

– Weigh out kettle finings, yeast nutrients, etc.

Brew Day:

• Mash in and start the clock. Set timers for everything.

• Put boil additions (hops, flavors, other additives, etc.) into vessels marked with time so they’re just grab and dump (e.g., put your 5-minute hops and yeast nutrient, kettle finings in a single “5-minute” container).

• Turn on the boil heat as soon as the kettle floor is covered with wort.

• Clean as you go! 

– Use extra hot water in the HLT.

– Clean the mash tun while boiling.

– Put away tools when no longer needed.

• Chill the wort and pitch the yeast.

• Rinse the chiller and put the beer to bed. Soak the boil vessel with cleaner and have a beer.

The Day After:

• Clean the boil kettle and any miscellaneous gear.

• Check on the fermenter. Has fermentation started? Is it at the right temperature? 

Splitting the brew day into discrete blocks makes the time dedicated to brewing more manageable. That first day’s work — no more than an hour if you’re efficient — sets you on an easy glide path to success. Better yet, you improve your chances of brewing! By the time you’re done, the brew day is inevitable — it will happen. Everything is ready to go! 

The second day becomes more focused — it’s just brewing now and depending on your system and goals, it might be a 3- to 5-hour day. And we know you were already going to check on your fermenter the next day, so you can spend a few minutes finalizing the cleanup! 

There Are Other Ways

This isn’t the only way to split your brew day — it’s just the way we do it. 

One of the most popular is to mash overnight. Brewers will strike their mash in the evening and get it settled at conversion temperatures. They will “hold” the mash temperature until morning (by wrapping the mash tun in insulation and blankets or setting their system to maintain rest temperatures) and proceed to lauter and boil when they wake up. 

There are concerns with this technique. Passive systems will lose temperature over the hours. Unmonitored heated systems create safety hazards. Others will worry about the impact of prolonged enzymatic activity on the beer’s body and head. Then there’s the concern that the naturally occurring malt microbes will sour the beer or produce the lovely and uniquely rank odors if left too long. But plenty of brewers use this shortcut to produce another round for their taps. 

We’d be remiss not to mention that kettle sour brewing is effectively “overnight wort sitting.” In other words, going a tiny bit further by lautering the wort, simmering to clear the microbial deck and inoculating the kettle with fresh Lactobacillus to produce lactic acid while you sleep. Those brewers don’t even have to worry about the sparge in the morning!

Skipping Steps to Save Time

Brewers can be set in their ways. They learn a successful way to brew and any deviation from it will be looked at with a jaundiced eye. However, there are plenty of other changes that we can make to reduce active time spent. 

Shorter Mashes and Boils

We already mentioned shortening the mash and boil length. Modern malt converts to sugar rapidly and with adjustments to hop schedules, an hour boil is no longer truly necessary. Short-time brewers seem to settle on around 30 minutes for each step as “ideal.” Opinions abound on this practice — “longer mash times allow more complete starch conversion” or “longer boils yield better quality and clarity.” So again, play around and try it and see if it works for you. I still do longer mashes and boils because muscle memory is really, really hard to unlearn, plus I have more time for coffee or beer.

Skip the Sparge

Sparging is one place that is a hidden time sink in brewing. It is the largest block of unspecified time in the brewing process. Do you take 10 minutes? 30 minutes? 60 minutes? Good luck finding a recipe written with that information as it’s so brewer- and brewery-specific. Why not skip it with full volume or no-sparge brewing? 

For commercial breweries, the technique isn’t viable because of system volume constraints (big vessels are expensive and no-sparge brewing is less efficient), but at the homebrew level, we can easily scale our systems cheaply for the additional volume. Mash in with the full volume of liquid (your mash + sparge water) and then lauter as normal without any sparging. All that time spent carefully adding “just enough” water to rinse the grains and slowly drain is now free to spend doing other tasks. 

This process fits especially well for Brew-In-A-Bag (BIAB) and all-in-one system brewers. But the naysayers will decry that by using all the water in the mash, you’ll throw off the precious calculus of water-to-grist ratios! You’ll affect your body . . . but will you? Really? Try it and you can always add more body-building malts on the next attempt if desired. Or strike a balance and add some of the sparge water to the mash and the balance directly to the kettle to hit pre-boil gravity or volume target.

Chill Out

On the other end of the boil process is chilling. I already mentioned upgrading your chiller if, like me, you have tap water warm enough to make a lovely cup of tea. But as much as we recommend chilling your beer rapidly (for improved clarity from protein coagulation and reduced time without yeast reproduction), you can cut out the chilling process altogether by embracing the no-chill process. Just pack the wort away in a heat-proof sealed vessel (like an HDPE water cube) and wait until the morning to transfer and pitch the yeast. There’s funky hop “math” involved to avoid over-bittering the final beer from hops sitting hot for longer. Read a more comprehensive no-chill primer here.

You can shorten the time if you have a pool and can dunk the sealed fermenter for a few hours in the water. Or you can partially chill the wort in the kettle and finish the chilling in your fermenter (this is what Drew does) .

Bonus Tip from BYO’s Technical Editor, Ashton Lewis: I bought a Grainfather G40 with counterflow wort chiller to replace my old “pot and immersion” system. However, this new chiller does not work well with warm water, so I repurposed my old immersion cooler to chill my cooling water by plunking it in a 5-gallon (19-L) bucket, covering with ice, and running water through it on the way to my new cooler. This is a time-saver!

Yeastie Boys

Making starters can take a fair amount of time ahead of the brew day with essentially a short brew day to make starter wort and then handling the starter down the line. With the myriad dried strains available to the average homebrewer, you could easily skip the starter in favor of a packet. If liquid yeast is your jam and you don’t want to spend time with a starter, buy an extra pack of liquid yeast.

It should be clear that there are tradeoffs with every shortcut out there. It’s up to you to decide if the risks or costs are worthwhile. Give them a try and see what works for you.

More Radical Changes

We’ve covered the straightforward things. Now stop and ask yourself: Can I save time by thinking differently about what I’m brewing?

Go Small

The first radical change is to change how much you’re brewing. There’s nothing magical about the standard brew volume of 5 gallons (19 L). If your goal is to brew and not to brew the most volume of beer for the effort, then going small is a great way to continue to experiment. It’s not going to save you a ton of time, but less time milling grains, heating mash water, getting to a boil, cooling wort, etc., will add up.

There’s a ton of brewing advice out there about 1-gallon (3.8-L) batch brewing, but my sweet “small” spot is the 2.5- to 3-gallon (9.5- to 11-L) mark. At this volume, you get the benefit of faster heating, cooling, and transferring times with enough finished beer to make you regret not brewing more of the great beers and grateful that you don’t have too much of the “interesting” stuff.

Extract Batches

So far, we’ve been presuming that brewing means mashing, but we know that many brewers start with extract and grains. There’s no reason not to turn back the clock and brew an extract batch. As long as you get your hands on fresh extract, you will make great beer. Remember that the “problem” with extract brewing isn’t usually the extract, it’s newbie brewer error. An experienced brewer will make extract sing.

In a radical effort to reduce time requirements, we’re seeing a rise in extract-based brew solutions that skip the boil entirely. Setups like the Pinter or MoreBeer!’s Flash Brewing attempt to deliver on the “mix and ferment” concept using pre-hopped extracts or hop extract shots. Mix the extract, water, and flavors together, pitch yeast, and ferment. 

That might be the fastest brew in the West. It may feel like cheating. You definitely have less control, but if it keeps you brewing and encourages others to start, then Prost! 

Where Not To “Save”

I’ve covered a lot of ways to shave precious time off your brew session — some would say “ways to cut corners.” But remember as you brew to keep two things centered in your mind. First, consider what impact a shortcut/change will have on your final product. Second, sanitation, no matter what. Lose sight of either and you might make unstellar beer. Trimming four hours off your day won’t matter if you wasted all the other time making an underwhelming or infected beer.

And our usual reminder applies — happy, healthy, vital yeast forgives a multitude of sins. 

We’ve laid out a bunch of tactics to try — now we encourage you to mix in the ones that work for you. Just think, with all the time you save, you could brew another batch!

Related Links:

• No-sparge brewing is just what it sounds like. You skip the sparging step and just drain the wort from the mash into the boil kettle. Learn more about performing this technique at www.byo.com/articles/no-sparge-brewing

• Some historical styles skip the boil step altogether, and what brewers have learned from these beers is causing some to consider skipping the boil with modern styles — especially hazier styles with low bitterness. 
www.byo.com/articles/brewing-no-boil-neipa