Homebrewing is a time-intensive hobby and producing even the most basic beer can take several hours. Many homebrewers have trouble finding the time to brew as often as they like, but there are some simple things that can be done to address this problem. Here are five easy ways you can save precious minutes and hours on brew day.

Clean as you go

One of the biggest pain points for many homebrewers is the dreaded cleaning step after completing a successful brew day. Nothing is more annoying than having a 45 minute cleaning session after your beer has been transferred to the fermentor and the yeast pitched. Thankfully there is plenty of downtime between steps to clean as you go and reduce work at the end of the session. If you plan ahead, you can shave off precious minutes from the end of the day by cleaning during downtime.

For those all-grain brewers out there, cleaning up after the mash is one of the easiest ways to clean as you go. The details will depend on your setup but take a minute on your next brew day to look around while you wait for the wort to come to a boil.

If you are a brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) brewer:

  • Dump the spent grain and clean the bag. Wash it with soap to remove the excess sugar and set it to dry in the sun.
  • Disassemble any equipment used to lift and squeeze the bag.

For traditional mash/lauter brewers:

  • Clean, dry, and store the mash tun.

Some pieces of equipment like the kettle and chiller will always be left until the end, but you can do small things to save time later. Spray off the chiller and put it in a bucket so that it doesn’t dry out. This makes it easy to wash later without scrubbing. The same logic applies to hoses, kettle parts and mash paddles: rinse off any surface that has touched wort so that it doesn’t harden.

Overall, make sure you don’t leave any cleaning steps for the end that can be done while waiting around for the boil or chilling steps to complete.

Prep the night before

There are two key steps you can take the night before to jump straight into mashing on the day of: prepare your water and grain. It can take 45-60 minutes to prepare your brewing water, bring it to the strike temperature, all while trying to find, weigh and measure your grain. If you mill your own grain, milling can take longer than you expect. That anxious feeling of waiting for the mill to finish when your water is at strike temp is not a pleasant one.

For prepping your water, here’s a list of things you can do in advance:

  • Purchase RO water if not using tap water
  • Calculate and measure the volume needed for the mash
  • Weigh any water chemistry additions and mix them into the water
  • Program an electric kettle to heat at a certain time (if applicable)

For prepping grain, here’s a handy checklist:

  • Wash/dry buckets used to hold grain
  • Find any grain needed for the recipe
  • Weigh and mix the grain in proper amounts
  • Mill the grain

If you complete all these steps in advance, you should be able to either mash in directly or simply heat your mash water and be ready to start.

Here are a few other things you can prep in advance if you are feeling inspired:

  • Rinse the boil kettle
  • Clean and sanitize the fermentor
  • Clean the chiller
  • Prepare the airlock/blowoff tube

Reduce time at each major step

One often overlooked way to reduce time on brew day is to eliminate lengthy steps, like whirlpools, lengthy boils or multi-step mashes. It might be a common practice to boil for 90+ minutes for certain styles but it may be sufficient to cut that to 75 minutes. A traditional 60 minute boil can easily be cut by 10 minutes with some simple hop adjustments.

Mashing is usually 60 minutes but 45 is probably sufficient for most grain bills. Reducing mash time may reduce efficiency by a few points, which can easily be accounted for by adding extra grain. An easy way to check if the mash is complete is by using an iodine test. Simply pull some work and add some iodine drops. If it turns black, then it’s not finished, but if it stays clear then you know all the starch has been converted.

This approach can be taken to the extreme in some styles. Brulosophy has a whole series of beers made with shortened mash and boils called Short and Shoddy, with some brew days taking less than 2 hours.

Another approach is to stick to simple recipes. Use a 0 minute aroma hop addition rather than a 10 minute whirlpool. Skip that mashout step. Skip all step mashing entirely. With modern malts, a single-infusion mash is sufficient in most cases. Sure, learning to decoction mash may help you brew that award-winning pilsner but save it for another day if you are trying to get in and out.

Optimize your equipment

Ultimately your process and equipment will define the time it takes to produce beer. If you are going for speed, there are methods that are faster and arguably produce the same quality product. Switching to a programmable electric all-in-one system is one example. As mentioned above, you can skip the entire time waiting to heat mash water by programming the system to do it the night before. Even if you can’t program your electric kettle, it’s much easier to turn it on and walk away as compared to propane.

Optimizing your chilling method is another opportunity to save time. The tradeoff here is the time taken to chill vs the time taken to clean. Since the chiller can’t be cleaned while waiting for another step in most setups, it directly adds to the total cleaning time at the end. Having a chiller save 5 minutes chilling but adding 10 for cleaning is a net loss. For most 5 gallon homebrew setups, the most basic immersion chiller can bring boiling wort down to room temp in ~10 minutes if the wort is stirred constantly. Counterflow and plate chillers are notoriously difficult to clean and require extensive processes to prevent infections. Do yourself a favor and try out an immersion chiller if you don’t have one already. If you do, try the stir method and notice how much faster it is compared to before.

The last example is to move to BIAB to both save time on cleaning and skip the sparge step. BIAB eliminates the time taken to sparge and goes straight to heating the wort, which can be done while draining/squeezing the bag. BIAB overall has less equipment to manage, meaning less cleaning. Many all-in-one electric systems come with complex, multi-part systems that require extensive cleaning. For this reason, electric brewers eventually ditch their stainless steel malt pipe for a brew bag simply because they get tired of cleaning all the parts. It’s much easier to clean one cloth bag than several oddly shaped malt pipe parts.

Defer the cleaning step

If you are really tight on time, try working smarter and not harder when it comes to cleaning. Heat up a few gallons of water and PBD to 120F-140F in your boil kettle and toss in all the stuff you need to clean. Walk away for a few hours (or overnight if you forget) and come back when you have more time. The PBW will loosen any tough to clean areas and make the remaining cleaning a breeze.

Conclusion

There are five easy ways to reduce time on brew day:

  • Clean as you go to save on cleaning time at the end
  • Prep the night before to go straight to mashing in
  • Cut out lengthy mash and boil steps
  • Optimize your equipment to save time
  • Defer the cleaning until you have more time

Cheers!