Longest Brew Day?

From prep to clean up I think about 9 hours for a big English Barleywine. The beer is in the secondary conditioning now, it was very tasty but hot still. I hope it will be ready around Christmas time.

 

Depends on recipes and methods, and how many brews I'm doing. My longest day usually runs 11 hours if I'm doing two batches of bigger beers with longer boils.

 

triple decocted maple sap octoberfest...believe is was 10+ hours. I think I had carpal tunnel for like a week after that one.

 

14 hours on two separate occasions... Was dumb enough to brew 20 gallons of double decocted Hefeweizen and 20 gallons of IPA by myself one day and then a week later did 10 gallons of barleywine with a 120 minute boil and 15 gallons of imperial milk stout. Everything went smoothly on both days and all beers turned out great (Save for the barleywine fermented with S-04... jury still out), but it was a grind, especially the large decoctions with the weizens.

Next closest was a problematic double brew day where the mash of an ~11% Imperial Red Ale with Rye (25%) stuck on me despite a beta glucanase rest. After attempting to heat to sacch while recirculating and getting stuck, twice, I ended up having to double decoct the beer to go from beta glucanase rest to sacch, then sacch to mashout, and then ran off at a trickle. Ended up being a 10 hour brew day for that beer alone, when coupled with the BIAB Black IPA I started the day with, resulted in a 13 hour brew day, not including clean up. Ugh.

No waxing poetic here

 

A friend and I made three separate 5.5gal batches in 1 day. 2 at his house then 1 at my house with a trip to the LHBS in between. Total time 12 hours, total beer 16.5gal (orange wit, cream ale, english pale ale). By the end of the third batch we were definitely ready to enjoy a couple of celebratory beverages!

 

October 3rd 2009. Weizenbock/Dunkelweizen partigyle. 12 hours, I remember about the first 6.
Double decoction boiling 30 minutes each. The runoff was painfully slow.
Collected around 1.5 gallons of first runnings and boiled 1.5 hours with the last 30 minutes the wort looked like lava.
Convenient that I did a 1.5 hour first runnings boil because that is how long it took the next 5 gallons to sparge.
I do remember having buckets of wort everywhere during this ordeal.
Proceeded with the 60 min boil on the Weizenbock and ended up with an OG of 1.126 when I was expecting 1.100.
Fortunately, the dunkelweizen still clocked in at 1.046.
Dunkelweizen was really tasty. Weizenbock was a thing of legend.
Recently I finally tried to replicate the Weizenbock. Still smoldering at 1.060 with some Brett C dropping about a point a week.

 

Any interest in doing a trade when you finally bottle that thing? I'm way too curious about that thing tastes.

 

Sure.

 

Hey, that was the day I got married.
Coincidentally, I remember that being a long day too.

 

Barleywine from 2009. 6 hrs for the boil alone. It still tastes pretty damn good!

 

I had an 8.5 hour brew day on NHD where a friend and I did a partigyle with 3 runnings and 3 beers. Actually went pretty quick considering we only had two boil kettles and numerous homebrews throughout the day.

 

Discounting the times I experienced problems? I don't understand what you mean by this. A brew day without problems is ... incomprehensible? Something always goes wrong. That's the nature of homebrew, no?

One of my longest brew days must be the time I triple-decocted a pilsner-like ale. I know what you are thinking: why go through all the trouble of a triple decoction to brew a pale ale? Well, live and learn, I suppose. It was several years ago, and I wanted to decoct just to say so. I do not have any extant records of the length of the brew day, etc., but I was brewing in an efficiency apartment on an efficiency electric stove top. My decoctions always seemed to not get up to the expected rest temps, so I recall do extra decoctions with each step to try to get to the rest temp. I'm betting it was more than your 11 hours, but have no way of knowing for sure - those brain cells responsible for those specific memories passed on long ago. The only thing that remains in my brain is a healthy fear of decoction. Unfortunately, it hasn't steered me clear of cereal mashing adjunct grains, which has caused me some stuck sparges in recent history, leading to long brew days.

Other than this lone decoction and cereal mashing, I attribute my longer brewdays to brewing mutliple batches, running out of key ingredients, and falling asleep at the wheel during the cool-down.

 

I might have had around 7-8 hours for a big 1.125 RIS I did a few months back..

Mashed for a while just to try and get everything I could from it. Sparged super slow to again, get all that I could.. then I had a... 90 min boil I think.. Chilled it, which didn't get me down far enough, so I had to put it in fermentation chamber.. then hit it with 02... Then pitch.

Then cleaning up, which is totally the worst part.

 

If you ask my wife they are all 15-20 hours

 

I did this once and was PISSED when I woke up. The immersion chiller was running for about 5 hours (chilling done in my apt bathtub) before I woke up.

 

Does it also make parts of your living space dirty (including those not involved in the brewing process at all ). I find myself cleaning areas completely unrelated to my brewing .

 

In my case, I felt the pull of sleep and turned off the water, covered my kettle, and stuck it in a snow bank.

 

An orange wit cream ale sounds like a good idea. (I'm glad I misread that). I'll be adding lactose to my next batch.