While its heating you can clean your mash vessel and measure and crush your grains.
Quickly clean your hot liquor tun, add your mash water and get it on the burner first. To get started quickly you need to get the mash water started right away. Pitching enough yeast will cut down on your fermentation time, and a strong active starter will always ferment more quickly than yeast you removed from the fridge just a few hours ago. If brewing with liquid yeast, creating a starter a day or two in advance is always a good idea. Crush the grains ahead of time if possible, or crush them while you are heating your mash water if needed. Go with a single step infusion mash to cut down on mash time. This means having the recipe and ingredients ready and available. To brew all grain rapidly you need to be prepared. Brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) can even save more time as you have less equipment to clean and also a shorter sparge phase. Three hours may be a challenge for some but its a realistic goal if you plan ahead and overlap activities as much as possible. Our goal here is to brew a complete batch of all grain beer in into the fermenter in three hours or less. Sure it is great to enjoy an all-day brewing session with friends, but there are times when you may not have 5 or 6 hours (or more) to brew a batch of beer. In our busy world, time is the most valuable commodity. In part 2 we’ll take a look at ways to speed up your fermentation and aging so you can enjoy your beer more quickly.
So this week in part 1 I take a look at ways to shorten your all grain brewing session so you can brew more beer in less time. Follow all incredibly busy these days and many of us are short on time to brew.