Homebrew Guys

By Don Rowell & Paul McDermott

YOU USUALLY PAY DOUBLE FOR THAT COTTON

Part 2

In the last article we discussed how to get more variety out of your brew day. In this segment we will focus on getting more volume out of your brew day.

This can be achieved one of two ways. One takes more time and the other takes more money. For homebrewers, time is cheaper than equipment, so most people will think more about taking the time route. As with most of our articles, this can be applied to both extract and all-grain brewing.

After you’ve been brewing for a while, you quickly learn that five gallons of beer really isn’t that much beer. By the time you give bottles away to family and friends to show off your brewing skills, you might be lucky to have a case (24 bottles) left for yourself. Seeing that it takes at least a month to produce a new beer, a case of beer is not much beer for you after all the effort you’ve put in.

The first and easiest way to get more volume out of your brew day is to obviously do bigger batches. This is the money route. Other than using your current fermenters, you will have to buy or make a new larger brewhouse and get additional fermenters. If you have the money, this is the way to go. Keep in mind that as you go bigger, you may also need to change your setup by adding pumps to your brewhouse. It’s not as easy picking up large vessels of 10+ gallons of water, wort, etc. to drain into another as it was at five gallons.

Time is on your side when it comes to saving a little cash. The other way to get more volume is to simply brew more batches. Before you put that equipment away on brew day, do a second batch. You don’t need a new brewhouse for this, but you will still need to get more fermenters. Good thing is, fermenters are a lot cheaper than a new brewhouse unless you are able to build a brewhouse out of other vessels (see Fall 2018 issue).

If you’re like most homebrewers, you do a deep cleaning of all your equipment after you’re done brewing for the day. When you do back-to-back brewing on the same day, you just need to do a quick rinse of the equipment and brew the next batch. There is very little added cleaning to your process. If you’re an all-grain brewer, you can have your second mash going as your boiling and cooling your first batch. The advantage of this route is that you can do two completely different beers on brew day. You could do a light beer and a dark beer, hoppy beer and a wheat beer, etc.

In time you may be able to do both routes and achieve even more volume. As with most things homebrewing, you get and add things to your home brewery over time to absorb the cost. We started off doing five-gallon batches, moved to 10-gallon batches and now do double 10-gallon batches. We have a very small brew space and have to completely set up and tear down all the equipment on brew day. Start to finish it takes us at our very best five hours to do a 10-gallon batch of an all-grain beer. We are now doing 20 gallons in about seven-and-a-half to eight hours consistently by brewing two batches.

As you can see with a little extra time, you get twice the volume. If we combine both parts of how to get more out of your brew day (parts 1 and 2 to this article), we could have up to four different beers in an eight-hour brew day. If you are doing five-gallon batches, it will take even less time because it takes less time to heat and cool five gallons. Extract brewers could do it at a fraction of that time. We’ve heard of extract brewers doing as many as four five-gallon batches in one brew day.

Now keep in mind that with more volume comes more bottling. This is where kegging becomes more practical and just another added benefit to why a lot of homebrewers eventually move in that direction (we’ll discuss kegging in our next article).

Getting more volume out of your brewing is kind of a no-brainer, but we believe a lot of people may feel they don’t have the time to put into it. As you can see from this article, the time is minimal compared to the results you get and more importantly, the more beer you get to keep for yourself.

We hope you enjoyed this two-part series and we thank you for your support. Til next time … keep the burners lit, the spoons stirring and most importantly, remember the words of the great homebrewing pioneer, Charlie Papazian, “The best beer in the world is the one you brewed.” Cheers!

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