Three day brewday

I love brewing, but it can take a long time. Fitting it around busy family life and a full time job is a huge challenge. After work and one the kids are in bed an all grain brew is a hopeless and foolhardy affair bound to finish in a rush way after midnight. Even on a weekend there's often not time. 

In order to get the brew day done and balance it around everything else - I often resort to splitting the brew day over two or three days. This helps manage the time, and it seem to have little impact on the finished beer itself. The only perceptible impact I have noticed is that the beers tend to finish very dry. I put this down to leaving the wort overnight to cool - where i suppose the enzymes in the wort are continuing to eat away at the sugars and starches and convert these to fermentable sugars. 

Here's what this looks like in practice: 



Day 1 

Water prep and mash - in this case it was a BIAB mash and at the end of the mash, after lautering, I ran the wort into a bucket (in fact this is the bucket i'll use again later for the fermentation later.) At the end of the mash i leave the bag on top of a colander inside the mash tun, cover this and let it drain out overnight. 


 Day 2

Take a pre-boil gravity reading. Measure out hops and yeast nutrient. Start the kettle, and set alarms to warn me when the hops need to go in. Post boil empty into the fermenting bucket and check the temperature until it drops to whirlpool temp (77C in this case). Chuck in the whirlpool hops in a sanitised bag and pop a lid on. I leave this to cool overnight (between October and March this is very effective at bringing the temperature down). 

Day 3 

Take another gravity reading to get the OG reading. Check the temperature is low enough to pitch the yeast (below 20C is my rule of thumb) - pitch the yeast and add an airlock. Then clear up. All done!