Author: Marshall Schott

There are those homebrewers who love the end-product, investing most of their energy in producing the best beer they can, spending hours pondering things like malt bills, the way different hops layer on top of each other, yeast selection, and fermentation temperature. Then there are those who love shiny shit, investing time and heaps of money building beautiful stainless breweries with pumps and control panels and other gadgets I’m too dumb to figure out; sure, they strive to make great beer, but the priority seems to be more on the system rather than the beer. One presumptuous observation I’ve made is that folks in the latter camp tend to dream of becoming professional brewers, while those in the former tend to be more interested in remaining a homebrewer. Of course, there is a spectrum and most of us tend to fall somewhere between the two extremes. As a dude with an admitted neurotic obsession with efficiency and simplicity, I am solidly in the realm of the former. But it wasn’t always this way…

Like most homebrewers new to the hobby, I started with a humble extract kit purchased from my local homebrew shop. I made decent beer using good sanitation practices and my apartment’s ambient temp (thanks to cool Bellingham weather). After those first few batches, I had visions of stainless dancing through my mind. When I made the jump to all-grain, one of the first things I bought was a stainless kettle. This set me on a path I’m sure many brewers can identify with. Within a year, my garage donned a decked out single-tier 3 burner brew stand, multiple stainless kettles and keggles, 2 pumps, hoses with camlocks, plate chillers, and plans to purchase a stainless conical or two. My brewery was almost complete… and a complete pain in the ass. After a couple months, I realized I was not enjoying my brew days near as much as I thought I would. What once was an enjoyable 5 or so hour process was now taking me 6+ hours, most of the additional time in setup and clean-up.

I fought the urge to revert back to my old ways, but after one particularly shitty brew day that involved my plate chiller spewing black crap into my boiling wort, the pump cavitating, and a poorly secured camlock popping off and allowing about a gallon of hot wort to cover my garage floor, I admitted to myself that all my work was for naught. The beers I’d made on this system were no different in quality than those I’d made on a much more simple system. I was ready for a change and Craigslist helped me reset. I sold off the keggles, brew stand, plate chiller, and pumps, opting for a less expensive and remarkably more simple setup of “economy” kettles, two Bayou KAB-4 burners, a high quality immersion chiller, and a 1 gallon pitcher for moving hot liquids. With the money I had leftover, I decided to build my own stand attached to my garage and run natural gas to my burners. After realizing I’d have a difficult time controlling fermentation temps with a conical, I ditched that idea, too. Plastic carboys had always done a fine job, no need to fix what’s not broken. My first brew day, two 5 gallon batches side-by-side, lasted almost exactly 5 hours, setup to clean-up. I was pleased. And the beer was fantastic.

As with most things in my life, I’m constantly looking for the easiest way to achieve high quality results. Sometimes I get lost in a vision, usually driven by what some other schmuck swears to be better, but I usually come back around and settle on a much simpler solution.

Heuristics are “experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery,” basically self-discovered rules-of-thumb. Over the years, my buddies and I have come up with a few that have made the brew day go more smoothly without having any negative impact on the quality of our beer.

One thing I haven’t changed since I started all-grain brewing is my preferred method of mashing– I batch sparge in converted 70 quart Coleman Xtreme coolers. I’ve fly sparged, no-sparged, and done Brew-In-a-Bag (BIAB), I just like the ease of batch sparging. While what follows was written from a batch sparger’s perspective, much of what is recommended can easily be applied to brewers of all persuasions, partial-mash or extract included.

Here goes, my “brewtine,” if you will:

| THE DAY BEFORE BREWING |

Measure out and mill grains, keep in covered bucket overnight, throw any salt additions in with milled grains.

Collect mash/strike water in kettle and sparge water in bucket, that way you’re not fussing around with water collection on brew day.

Chill fermentation chamber to about 45˚F, this will help get wort to pitching temp faster during the warmer months when groundwater is warmer (my groundwater can be as warm as 72˚F in the summer).

Setup all equipment (connect gas, set MLT on table, get other equipment ready)

Move starters to cool fermentation chamber for overnight cold crash… after making any collections, of course.

| BREW DAY |

Start burners before making coffee and eating breakfast (I’m a morning brewer), or if you brew later, get the flame going on your strike water 30 minutes before you plan to actually “start.”

Measure out hops while heating strike water.

Pre-heat your mash tun with the full volume of your strike water, just heat 7-10˚ warmer than your strike temperature, close the lid on your tun, and let it sit for 5 minutes; if it’s still too warm after that, simply stir until you reach strike temp. It’s not worth messing around with adding and dumping boiling water. Then add your grain to the strike water. This produces much more predictable and consistent mash temps compared to adding the water to grains, in my experience.

| MASHING |

There seems to be an inverse relationship between OG and efficiency, at least for homebrewers. This means the higher the OG, the lower you can expect your efficiency to be. This can easily be mitigated by using the following rules of thumb:

If expected OG is 1.040 or less , perform a no sparge, which is very simple and shaves 30-60 minutes off your brew day. All you do here is add the entire water volume, mash and sparge, into the mash tun at the same time. This procedure will absolutely have an impact on efficiency in normal sized beers, but for < 1.040 beers, you will usually get right around 70-75%, which is beautiful! This will produce a nice, malt-forward beer, which is exactly what smaller beers need. Most BIAB brewers use this method regularly.

If expected OG is 1.041 – 1.060 , perform your standard sparge procedure, which for me amounts to collecting two runnings. This is what most of us have been doing. If you’ve honed your system, this should get you right around your target efficiency.

If expected OG is higher than 1.060 , perform a double batch sparge, which can be done a couple ways. The first is to split your entire water volume into thirds, so you mash with 1/3, perform first sparge with 1/3, and perform a 2nd sparge with 1/3. The other way is to mash with the regular volume then split your sparge in half. Either way, you’re collecting 3 runnings. This will add maybe 30 minutes to your brew day, but your efficiency will be higher than if you performed a standard batch sparge.

| WORT CHILLING |

Make sure to utilize your chiller efficiently by turning your source water to full blast and constantly agitating your wort by either stirring or moving the IC around constantly. For CFC users, your wort will still chill quicker with increased water flow.

When groundwater is warmer than pitching temp, place chilled wort in pre-chilled 45˚ freezer, attach insulated probe to fermenter, set regulator to ferment temp, and wait a couple hours for the wort to chill while the freezer warms up. This usually takes 2-4 hours for me, and as long as you practice good sanitation, you’ll be all good.

| FERMENTATION |

Pitch cool, always! This will limit unwanted ester production. I always chill my wort to 2˚ below my intended fermentation temp.

For clean American-style ale : pitch at 62-64˚, ferment at 64-66˚ for 2-4 days, turn regulator up to 70˚ and let beer free rise to clean up and finish fermenting; after about 2 weeks (from pitch), remove probe from bucket (so it’s measuring ambient temp) and set regulator to 30˚ for 2-7 day cold crash. If you bottle condition, there will be plenty of yeast left in suspension to carbonate your beer.

For English-style ale : pitch at 64-66˚, ferment at 66-68˚ for 2-4 days, turn regulator up to 70˚ and let beer free rise to clean up and finish fermenting; after about 2 weeks (from pitch), remove probe from bucket and set regulator to 30˚ for 2-7 day cold crash.

For Hybrid ale (Alt, Kölsch, Cal Common) : pitch at 56˚, ferment at 58˚ for 4-5 days, turn regulator up to 65˚ and let beer free rise to clean up and finish fermenting; after 10-21 days (from pitch), remove probe from bucket and set regulator to 30˚ for 4+ day cold crash/lagering period. If you keg, rack from fermenter after 4-10 day cold crash and place in kegerator for 1+ week lager period on gas.

For Lager beers : see my Quick Lager Method.

| PACKAGING |

Most people have gotten the hang of packaging their beer, whether bottling or kegging, so I don’t have much to say. One thing I do to reduce the amount of trub being transferred to my keg or bottling bucket is start the siphon at least 4-5″ above the yeast cake then slowly lower it as needed, gently tilting the carboy when necessary. My beers usually pour clear from the keg by the time they’re fully carbonated, which is 4-7 days.

If anyone else has helpful tricks they would be willing to share, please leave a comment, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it. Cheers!

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| Read More |

18 Ideas to Help Simplify Your Brew Day

7 Considerations for Making Better Homebrew

List of completed exBEERiments

How-to: Harvest yeast from starters

How-to: Make a lager in less than a month

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Brand New 5 gallon ball lock kegs discounted to $75 at Adventures in Homebrewing

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