Simple Efficiencies Make Big Differences in Brewing

When our club started brewing, our first priorities were to get the steps right, try to understand the process and what was happening, and to see where we could find efficiencies. After 2000 bottles of beer made, our knowledge is solid and our efficiencies are paying off.

New efficiencies on brew day have made it where we can add new processes to make a better beer and not take up any extra time in our day. The water still has to get up to boiling, the hops have to boil for an hour, but by switching to a contra-flow chiller instead of our immersion chiller, we have saved 45 minutes. We are then able to use 30 of those minutes to introduce a better aeration process, with an aeration stone instead of just shaking the carboy, which is getting us better fermentation and better beer.

With our fermentation starting faster and more vigorously from the additional oxygen, we are able to rack the brew to a secondary in 7 days instead of waiting 10-14 days typically before. For the racking process we invested in a new 1/2" racking cane to replace a 5/8" cane and have been able to rack 5 gallons of beer from carboy to carboy in 5 minutes instead of 15.

Bottling the beer has always felt like a long, painful process. We started sanitizing bottles by dunking them in a sanitized solution, in a bucket, but we got a bottle sprayer that we can pump the sanitizer in and set them asside to be filled, instead of filling the bottles individually and pouring them out. We also got a 1/2" bottle filler to replace a 5/8" one, and just like the racking cane, we improved our time. We went from a 30+ minute process, to bottling 50 beers in 10 minutes.

It definitely seems like everything else in life, you live and learn, and time saved makes everything feel more manageable.