Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

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danbrew

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by danbrew » Tue Jul 19, 2011 8:35 am

smbenn wrote:Just a quickie on this popular post: has anyone done an overnight midweek AG, with mashing, sparging and transfer to copper (and seal) the first evening, then add hops and commence boil the second evening? Would anything happen to the wort in this time (c. 20 hours)?
I think I've seen someone do this before and suspect you'll be fine. The only things I'd say is make sure the boiler is sanitized as your mashings probably aren't even the right temp for pasteurisation let alone sterile... Also there's time lost in having to raise the temp to boiling on day two (where you'll be starting from c.20 degrees rather than c.70)...

...But a man's gotta do what a mans gotta do!

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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by smbenn » Mon Jul 25, 2011 8:07 am

Yeah, cheers BK. What I suspected. Actually managed to find time this weekend but worth bearing in mind.
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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by Titch » Mon Jul 25, 2011 9:42 am

i have now done 2 AG, two weeks apart,
do it saturday
the girls go swimming lessons i keep the youngest with me the boy who is up to no good at age 3
start about 10am have lunch when they return from swimming
get the boil going and have dinner with the family , return to boil, put in immerssion chiller, cool down, normally while the wife potters around the garden
kids amuse themselves
finish up with daughters helping clean etc

if weasther is rubbish kids get a movie and homemade popcorn

then make sure we do something on sunday

this week i brewed saturday went to Beaumaris on Sunday had a day in the sunshine

adm

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by adm » Mon Jul 25, 2011 10:00 am

If you can put your HLT on a timer (with a PID/thermostat arrangement) so it heats up early in the morning and is ready for you when needed, you can squeeze a 1hr mash / 1 hour boil brew into a little less than 4 hours - assuming you have all your ingredients weighed out and ready.

One other way to cut this time down would be the Australian "no chill" method of running the boiling wort into a container for storage then leaving it to cool overnight and pitch the yeast in the morning. I haven't tried this, but theoretically, you should be able to get down to less than three hours that way.

danbrew

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by danbrew » Mon Jul 25, 2011 9:30 pm

I did a no chill the other week on GW's Guinness Extra Stout... I tasted it before transferring it to FV and it was rather nice... I think I'll be doing no chill again... I'd say it saved me a good 45 minutes...

verno

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by verno » Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:14 pm

beerkiss wrote:Just another 2p worth.

I get the mash on from about 6pm then get the kids ready for/ in bed. Then continue from where I left off. I'm doing brew in a bag so don't really sparge but may bucket sparge if I feel like it. I'll cut the boil down to an hour (adjusting the hops) if I need to then chill with an immersion chiller. Clean up using the heated water from the chiller. Pitch the following morning...

Finished for about midnight last time but hopefully another brew coming up in a week or two so we'll see how it goes...
I have a 4 mth old and tried this for the first time. I got everything ready the night before or during a midday nap. I then spent 15 mins setting up the mash at around 5:30. Then bathed him and put him to bed. I then continued to brew through the evening. Finishing up about 11, although I only boiled for 60 mins. The downside is you don't spend time with the mrs but its 1 evening. Also cleaning up at 11 is a hassle, so I was pretty tired the next day.

howdood

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by howdood » Sun Aug 14, 2011 11:17 pm

hmm... I just managed to produce an AG brew while looking after my 10-month old son for the day. In fairness, he has a 40-minute sleep mid-morning and a 1:30 sleep after lunch, but if you line up all the equipment it's not impossible. 40 mins is enough to get the mash liquor on, measure out ingredients, clean / sterilise everything you need, mash in, refill liquor tank, arrange everything for sparging. Then there's nothing to be done for an hour until you turn on the heater in the liquor tank again and walk away for 20-30 mins before it's hot enough to sparge.

Other stages - boil, chilling - likewise only need setting up and occasional intervention. There's a lot of hanging around inbetween where you can fulfil childcare obligations - it's not like we're just out at the pub for 7 hours!
h

jimp2003

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by jimp2003 » Tue Aug 16, 2011 12:19 pm

I think if we are honest its not taking care of the kids during a brew day that is the problem here regardless of their age. As howdood and others have said there are intervals in the process where you are free to give time to them.

The pressure comes from SWMBO thinking that we are abandoning her to deal with the kids and giving us the level 5 skunk-eye while we try to brew. This makes us feel bad (rightly or wrongly) and sometimes guilty for doing something we enjoy. Do I feel the same and get the same level of grief when spending 4 or 5 hours away playing a round of golf and having a drink afterwards? - No, because I am removed from the home and therefore out of sight out of mind.

Andy__

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by Andy__ » Tue Aug 16, 2011 1:36 pm

Sorry if I am repeating what someone else has already written, but I just couldn’t be Ar$ed reading the full topic.

This spring I got the whole process down to 3.5 hours, including clean up. Most importantly I made good beer.

The trick was to be constantly preparing for the next stage of the process. e.g while mashing heat the sparge water, while sparging have the boiler heating the wort to boil etc.

I also allowed only 1 hour for mash and 1 hour for boil.

Additionally I have tried the over night mash, which I have seen mentioned, but also you could prepare the mash at breakfast and mash the grain while at work. Then in the evening finish it off.

Finally I occasionally start a mash on a Friday night and then brew through the night. I usually finish about 3am on the Saturday morning. That way I can sleep in on the Saturday morning, which most of us do anyway and then you have the whole weekend to spend with the family and SWMBO.

Hope this helps

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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by Deebee » Thu Aug 18, 2011 10:20 am

I know the feeling of feeling selfish i really do.

I tend to write my brew days down well in advance so swmbo knows when i am planning on doing it. I tend to leave an hour early from work on the friday i brew, then get the mash on whilst making dinner.

I started batch sparging due to the time it takes to fly sparge in the kitchen. it's the only place i can brew.

The beauty of this is that if the mash runs over the 90 minutes it doesn't matter, then once the first batch is on, i tend to help out. Whether the batch is 15 minutes of 45 it doesn't really matter. same with batch 2

if i get a clear run at it i can do a brew in just about 4 hours. In july i helped a mate. brewed 3x35 litres and 1x18 litres, 2 mt on the go and one boiler. took about 12 hours all in..

i think as long as you do not brw every week and do not spend every evening doing things brewing related then most are ok with it.

last year i was brewing and building a large fence at the same time.

I do feel selfish when they are all sitting around watching telly and eating pizza, whilst i am just in the kitchen doing my own thing though.

What i really want is my own brew room.
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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by Naich » Thu Aug 18, 2011 4:36 pm

The best one I had was one morning when I was just finishing up after an overnight mash. We were off out and the missus asked me what time I'd be finished, so I said about 10 o'clock. 10 o'clock on the dot, I was draining into the FV while she was sitting in the car with the kids in order to "help me out by saving time and getting everyone ready". Thanks for that. :| No pressure there then. I now add 30 minutes on to any estimate I give.

Not that I've been doing much brewing recently :( With the summer holidays and some fairly serious DIY going on that takes priority (most of our furniture is currently stacked in a gazebo in the garden), I'm not going to get a chance to do anything until the end of the month.

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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by davew » Thu Aug 18, 2011 10:52 pm

Well I'm going to try a double strength wort batch to fill 2 cronies this weekend, basically make 25l of high gravity wort and dilute down to 38l with cold water treated with campden.

If i've got my calculations correct it should work out by using 2.5x the bittering hops of a 19l brew.

It's going to be a Coniston bluebird clone using this recipe:

OG 1036 ABV 3.6% 37 EBU

6.034g Pale Malt
313g crystal malt
82g challenger 60 mins
35g challenger 15 mins.
1 protafloc tablet 15mins.
2x sachets Safale S-04

I've got myself a 60l fermenter and hopefully should work out, I don't have an immersion chiller but the no chill method has worked out for me in the past.
Fermenting: Wilkos Cider
Drinking: Wilkos Hoppy Copper (very nice)

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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by WishboneBrewery » Fri Aug 19, 2011 7:15 am

davew wrote:OG 1036 ABV 3.6% 37 EBU

6.034g Pale Malt
313g crystal malt
82g challenger 60 mins
35g challenger 15 mins.
No hops later than 15mins? I'd bung at bare minimum of 40-60g in at Flameout, possibly more like 100-120g... But thats just me :)

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Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by davew » Fri Aug 19, 2011 8:05 am

pdtnc wrote:
davew wrote:OG 1036 ABV 3.6% 37 EBU

6.034g Pale Malt
313g crystal malt
82g challenger 60 mins
35g challenger 15 mins.
No hops later than 15mins? I'd bung at bare minimum of 40-60g in at Flameout, possibly more like 100-120g... But thats just me :)
Yes I would do normally but I do like Bluebird and thought I would stick to the recipe as this is my first time with this method.
Fermenting: Wilkos Cider
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chazzb

Re: Fitting In All Grain Brewing With A Young Family

Post by chazzb » Sun Aug 21, 2011 11:17 pm

I had the same problem until I started taking notes about wait time vs intervention time.

So what you need to do is to try and split those 7 and-a-bit hours into times when you're actually doing stuff, and times when you're waiting for something to happen.

For example, let's assume you need to bring 10 litres of mashing-in water up to 70+C(ish) from cold. That's going to be 20 minutes. Measure the water, switch it on, back to playing with the kids. Get yourself a cheap runner's stopwatch to time it. Measure out your sparge water and put it in the HLT.

Mash-in for 10 minutes then you're free for 40 more minutes before you need to switch on your sparge water. This is a 30 second job. So far, you're running at nearly 90 minutes with only 15(ish) minutes intervention. If your mash/sparge water goes over temperature, just switch off and give it 5 minutes to cool a bit. It won't harm your mash to wait a few minutes extra.

Then, you need to get yourself a spinny sparge arm. Once the mash time is up and your HLT is up to temp, open your mash tun, recirculate the first bits, then hook up your sparge. Spend five or so minutes calibrating the sparge flow and there you go - you've got another 20-30 minutes on your hands.

Next up, the boil. Once you've sparged, your boiler is going to need 20 mins approx to get a rolling boil going. Again, doesn't matter if you miss the actual point it hits the boil - you might be 5, 10 mins late but it won't harm anything. Use your runners watch again to time the boil and the hop additions.

Finally, hook up your cooler (or, like others suggest, cover and cool overnight). You're good to go.

Most of your 7+ hours will be waiting. Find out your wait times and use them to free you up to do other stuff (I sanded and painted a door while I did a brew). Time everything. Once you know what to expect you can knock out a brew with under an hour's intervention time - the rest of the time is yours.

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