I'm gonna' brew all day.

I have brewed back to back before. I always make sure i am mashing in on my second brew as my first on is boiling.

 

Why not try a parti-gyle?

 

I've done two batches back-to-back a few times, and even that is a long day. Even with overlap between mashing and boiling, I'm still in the 8 hour range, so I'd be looking at 11 or 12 for 3 batches ... ouch.

 

My buddy and I were just talking about this. He's ordered a 40-gal conical and fridge, which should get here in a couple of weeks. We'll still be left with the chest-freezer-6-carboy fermentation chamber, though. Since our brew days are generally few and far between, we were thinking about doing two 30-gallon batches on a single day. Plan is a Koelsch first (while the day is hotter), followed by a Černé Pivo (after sundown). Figure if we ever go commercial this will be good practice. That or we're getting old and losing our minds.

 

It's a long day. Having a second mash tun will be a big help; if you can rig something up ahead of time, do it.

 

I always do this when i brew. 3 batches every time. I figure if I'm going to get all of the equipment out, do all of the clean up, might as well get a lot of beer out of it. I do a parti-gyle for the 1st & 2nd batch. 1st batch being a 10% plus ale, 2nd rolling out around 5%. sometimes I'll add another 5 or so pounds grain to the mash for a quick 15 -20 minutes and that kicks up the 2nd batch to a higher abv if I want to. Once I get those 2 boiling I'll start on a new mash for a 3rd batch. Best tip is grind your grain the day before. And I hope you have multiple burners. I use 3. The other tip is plan out your day before hand. I've got an outline to remind me of things, helps me keep on track.

 

+1
Go ahead and Bang on the Tun All Day...

 

Just finished a triple, took around 10hrs. Hoppy Pils, Belgian inspired sour date, strawberry jalapeño lager. If you only have one kettle and no plate chiller the biggest time saver is to not chill in the kettle. It can save around 40 min depending on how slow your chiller works.. Otherwise just stay ahead of your self and have everything ready before its needed. Good Luck, its a doozy.

 

Strawberry jalapeno lager? Haven't seen that brewed before, I'd love to try it!

Now on the chiller / don't have a plate chiller...

Although this year hasn't been too bad, and has in fact been pretty cool (relatively, that is), It has gotten hot enough in TX this week to where it's completely impossible to get the wort below 70F by putting tap water through the wort chiller. So for a while now I've been collecting parts and stuff I'll need in my upgrade to ten gallons (not there yet, but picked up another freezer yesterday, cheep!). One of the things I picked up was a coil of 3/8" copper (perhaps 20 feet worth). Not particularly useful in my upgrade to ten gallons, but we did find a nice use for it. We coiled it by slowly bending until it fit nicely inside a 5 gallon bucket w/cooler insert (i.e. minnow bucket). Not that the shape of it makes any difference, but we frequently have this particular bucket filled with ice on brew day, so it serves its purpose. So with a little tubing and a couple hose clamps, we changed around the hardware of the wort chiller (standard chiller, I bought it long ago). The new setup runs the tap water through the pre-chiller coil, then into the wort chiller. You simply drop the pre-chiller coil into the icooler before you turn on the water (and make sure it's covered with ice, obviously).

Results of the first test were amazing. You could actively see that quite a bit of ice melted pretty quickly, even tho the tap water is only about 75F. Also, the part of the coil on the intake side was quite cold. This shows that there was good energy transfer, or at least good enough. But the really cool part was that the chilling process took maybe 25 minutes, from walking over to turn on the hose to straining and aerating the wort and pitching the yeast.

Honestly, I didn't think this idea would work as well as it did. I knew it would work to some extent, but wasn't sure how much time it would cut off the total chilling process. It's a LOT tho, the time difference is night and day. Last batch took forever to chill, and barely got to 70F after way too friggin' long. This one was done in 25 minutes. I think this should have a significant positive effect on my overall beer quality, as even in the winter my beer didn't chill this fast. Total cost was $4 worth of tubing (of which I had a few feet leftover) and $2 worth of hose clamps (I got the copper free from a friend, well, I owe him some beer but I didn't pay cash for it).

So even if you don't have a [insert special piece of equipment here], a little innovation can frequently have positive results.

 

If you have the equipment, I would try doing 2 at once. Having help comes in handy too. We usually mash for 18 gallons in one tun and 6 in another. We time them so that one will finish about 30 min before the other. Its a good 8 hours before the last item is cleaned and put away.

 

I have done two batches in one day. One approach I have taken is to try to get two beers from one big main mash. For example, I brewed an IPA and a dubbel from the same main mash of ~82% pils, 16% munich, and 2 % Extra Special Malt (approximately a C120). On the side, I simultaneously steeped a little more extra special and a few oz each of pale chocolate and carafa for the dubbel, and I added to this 1# of dark candi syrup in the boil. Of course, the beers had different hop schedules. I like the time efficiency of making two beers this way, but since I'm a stove top brewer and I only have one stove, the boils still make for a long brew day. If I were intent on doing this more often, I would get a couple cheap turkey fryer setups so I could do two full boils at once.

 

I always do at least two, sometimes three if I have nothing going on the next day. It is a LONG brew day. It just comes down to timing and doing things during "down time". I have a single tier system with two pumps and three burners, so I try to overlap what I can.

While strike water in MLT and 13 gal of water in HLT are getting up to temp, I measure out grains and grind the grist for Beer #1. Dough in, and set timer/recirculating pump. Measure out hops and any other adjunct additions into solo cups labeled "90 min, 60 min, 45 min" etc. Put them in line as to when they go in the BK. Also measure grains and grind grist for Beer #2. Once mash is done on Beer #1, start collecting into BK and fly sparge. At 3gal into the BK, kick on the burner on the BK. By the time you're done collecting, empty the MLT and refill with strike water for Beer #2. Once the protein break is over, dough in on Beer #2.

I use an app on my Nexus 10, Brew Aide. It pulls in my beersmith recipe and adds audible timers. So once this thing starts making noise, I grab the first solo cup in line, and add it to the hop spider. I do have a plate chiller, so it makes chilling a breeze. One pass direct into the fermentor. Clean out the BK, and start collecting on Beer #2. Rinse and repeat everything for Beer #3.

Once i'm boiling Beer #3, i transfer leftover hot water from HLT into MLT, and add PBW. Set it to recirculate through pump 1, and add water into HLT. Once Beer #3 is into the fermentor, transfer MLT solution into BK and set it to recirc through pump #2 and plate chiller. Transfer rinse water from HLT into MLT and rinse MLT/pump 1 combo. After 20 min, drain BK and transfer MLT to BK. Set it up to recirc rinse water through BK/pump2/plate chiller for 20 min. Drain and put everything away.

While this is my process, and probably more info than you cared for, I was merely trying to illustrate how I overlap events in what would otherwise be downtime. The solo cup thing, for me anyway, was one of those "Why haven't' I done this sooner" type things. makes additions into the BK "stupid easy". comes in reallllllly handy if you have people coming over to watch a brew day (and you lose track of time describing process/stuff going on, etc).

 

it's good to know that i can tell the wife "two brews on the weekend is nothing. guys on BA are brewing two beers a day."

 

well, I guess the way I look at it is, it's only going to be another hour and a half to brew the second beer. I've already dragged all the equipment out anyway, might as well. My bigger problem is having enough fermentors. i brew 10 gal batches. At the moment I have 9 buckets, 4 carboys all primary fermenting, and another 3 doing a long secondary (sour). What I brewed this past weekend, I can't even fit in my "fermenting closet". At the moment it's sitting behind my bar, with blow off tubes from all four buckts into a bucket of sanitizer. The dog is getting mighty pissed because it keeps waking him up from his naps...

 

I've done 2 brews in a day with 5 hours or so between them and finished up around 10pm. The key is sleep-brewing. I mash overnight and fill my kettle with strike water before I go to bed. I wake up around 5 and heat the strike water and set up my sparge which takes about 45 minutes and then I go back to bed. When I wake up around 8:30 the sparge is done and I go ahead and get it boiling. At that point, even if you only have one tun you could be me mashing your second brew as your first one boils, assuming you have a large stock pot and you can heat enough water on your stove top.

 

3 is the most I've done, and they all had 90 minute boils. I try to have that happen as little as possible as it makes for crazy long days. But the end result is always worth it.

 

June 1st Im bottling an IIPA, racking a Saison, and brewing an Cascadian Black Ale and an ESB. Gonna be a loooongo day. But as it was said before, well worth it in the end!!