Today I picked up a second brewkettle (8-gallon pot) and managed to knock out two 5-gallon batches in under 7 hours by juggling kettles on my stovetop. I'm all jazzed with my new setup and just want to talk about it! Does anyone else here regularly do more than one batch on a brewday? Especially the all-grain brewers out there.
Congrats on the new Upgrade! I have been doing split batches for about a year now. By that I mean, I do 10 gallons of a recipe as far as mash and boil. But split into two fermenters with different yeasts, sometimes different dry hops or one DH and the other not. It is very effectively two different beers when using two different yeasts.
For awhile I was brewing 2 batches per brew day. I had 2 mash tuns, so right after I got the first mash going, I would heat up the strike water and mash in for batch #2. I would then proceed as normal with batch #1 and once the kettle was free I would mash out and proceed with batch #2. I found the second batch only added a couple hours to the brew day, but it felt like utter chaos the whole time. There was no breaks, because every break you typically have with 1 batch was filled with a task for the second batch. Anyway it was great to have an extra beer with minimal time added, but I do not do this regularly any longer. An extreme example of this, we brewed all (almost all, there was 1 keg of Coors) the beer for my buddies wedding about a year ago. We used a 20 gallon system (15 gallons in to the fermenters) and were brewing 60 gallons, so needed 4 brew sessions. We started at 7am on a Saturday and brewed till 7pm to knock out 45 gallons. Started the final batch at 6am Sunday morning and finished at 11am. I had 12 carboys fermenting in my guest bedroom, it smelled like a commercial brewery the first couple days. The beer came out great, all homebrewed kegs kicked, whereas the 1 Coors keg was still 1/2 full.....success.
Sounds great! Awesome that you're able to do 8 gal pot on your stove. I'm stuck with a 5.5 gal pot doing 3.5 gal all grain batches. It'd be epic to be able to do 10 gal split batches. Mmm...never done two batches in a day though. Maybe I oughta...
I think the goal is to be mashing your second batch by the time you get your first batch up to a boil. If you do it right you should be able to get two batches done with adding just about an extra hour to your brew day. I did two mashes and two batches last weekend. I didn't get everything lined up, and yes, I used the crap out of my stove. I think it took me a little over six hours with some help from a friend at times. P.S. I brew outside on a propane burner. I use my stove for heating strike water and sparge water. The real bottleneck for me is getting enough hot water for the second mash on time. I have really hot sparge water go into the mash tun for the first batch and then I don't have anything left for the second mash. I use three elements on my stove with three stock pots to heat strike water immediately after I empty my pots for the first sparge. I can't imagine trying to do all of this alongside boiling my first batch inside the house! Well done!
I was happy to find that my gas stove had no problems with 2 big kettles at once. And like @jcojr72 said, there's *way* less down time than when doing a single batch. Now, with a second mash tun, maybe down to 4.5 hours for 2 batches? Maybe that's an indication to just move to a 15 gallon system
When I used to do BIAB brewing, I would often do 2 different BIAB batches simultaneously. 2x 15g kettles, 2 pumps, 2 chillers made it pretty simple to finish with 2x 5-7.5g batches in about 4.5 hours. Now that I'm doing traditional 3 kettle brewing (15g HLT, 15g MLT, 20g BK), I'll often partigyle to make 2 different strength beers from one mash. I'll mash in my largest kettle (I have a false bottom for it that I can install if I want to), collect the 1st runnings in one of my 15g kettles and my 2nd runnings other 15g kettle. Then boil them separately. I've got it down to where it only adds 20-30 minutes onto my brew day. Sometimes I even find ways to mash in my largest kettle, run off into my 2 smaller kettles, recirc the wort so that it's the same strength in each, and then use tricks to produce 2 different beers in the 2 smaller kettles. Sometimes 1 of the smaller kettles gets capped with specialty malts to alter it's profile. Other times, like the Hefewit I made, the only differences will be boil additions / yeast type pitched / fermentation profile. Variety is good
Ehh...be careful. We used to do a 10 gallon batch of a regular lineup beer and simultaneously do a new recipe 5 gallon batch. But that has since changed. Last time we tried that, it seemed like everything was going wrong, and we were kind of getting tired of forgetting to do things and realizing it too late (hop additions, mostly). We were chilling the 5 gallon batch with a copper immersion chiller while the 10 gallon batch was still boiling, and while I was taking a temperature reading or something, I noticed that the plastic tubing coming from the "out" end of the chiller began bulging (quickly), and it looked like the tubing was about to slide off the copper tube, despite the hose clamp on it. I yelled for my partner to kill the water (I thought he was closer to the spigot), but turns out he was mid-stream taking a leak in the corner of the back yard, nowhere near the spigot. Then boom! The tubing popped off the copper chiller and a fast stream of water shot directly at my laptop on the table outside, completely dowsing the thing. Turns out there was a kink in the hose that the immersion chiller was connected to, causing water to build up enough pressure to turn the chiller into a laptop-hunting water missile launcher. Luckily the laptop was ok (after draining upside-down for awhile), and in fact I'm using it now. But we now have 2 new rules: 1) No more simultaneously brewed batches 2) No more laptops outside on brew day
My brew buddy routinely does back to back 12 gal batches...long brew day. I prefer to brew a 10 gal batch to catch up and 5 gal batches for styles I know will last...but then again, I'm retired, only brewing for myself mostly and can leisurely brew whenever I like.
I always do more than one. I mash for 10 gallons and then split it into 2 5 gallon batches... Every so often I do an overnight mash on a single 5 gallon batch then while that one is going mash a second 5 gallon beer for 60 minutes (huge hit in my normal overnight efficiency though) and then boil that separate, but I don't really like to as it takes too long.
