Taking off Ken's thread on getting a batch to glass as fast as possible, I'm looking at how I might go from heating strike water to pitching as fast as possible.
I'm going to try a couple of no sparge batches this weekend, while aiming at getting through the process quickly. I hoping for sub-3hr batches, maybe as low as 2:40 if everything is smooth.
Estimated schedule would be as follows:
0:00 measure out water, start heating
0:10 Dough in
1:10 Drain MLT
1:25 On boil
2:25 Flameout/start chill
2:35 at pitch temp/oxygenate
2:40 Pitch
Obviously the big chunks are the mash and boil time. I recently did a batch where I added all the hops in the last 12 minutes of the boil. It was a spur of the moment thing, but I was really happy with how the beer came out. It was some kind of hoppy brown ale and even adding all the hops very late I was able to get a lot of IBUs. Guesstimating, it's probably 50-60 IBU. If I could get this process dialed in, perhaps reducing the boil time to 20. That knocks a good percentage off the batch time. Based on the timing above it would bring total time down to 2:00 even.
The mash is the other place to optimize. Historically, I've seen my conversion (stable Brix measurement) take 45-60 minutes in the low 150s. If I got all the conversion parameters dialed in perfectly, maybe get down to a 40 minute mash? If I could do that, the full batch from strike heating to pitch could be as low as 1:40.
I have to say it seems impossible, given that I'm usually totally disorganized and running around trying to get everything measured/ready as the brew is going. Even my smaller batches have been taking 5 hours to this point. It would be great to have a house IPA that I could brew up in less than 2 hours.
