Anyone who has ever tried all-grain homebrewing knows that brew day can last from 4 to 6 hours. Sometimes more. It doesn’t matter how big or, in my case, small the batch is it’s going to take some time. But wouldn’t it be nice to cut that down to a short enough time to do it on a week night after work? Without having to use extracts? Of course it would! So I did some reading.

I’ll admit right up front that the reading I did was on public homebrew forums – mostly Norther Brewer and More Beer. These are the sites that got me into brewing and supplied about 95% of the information I started out with. So I trust a lot of the folks on those sites and take their advice seriously because it’s backed up by experience. But there’s no substitute for doing something yourself. Well, that’s not always true. But in this case it seemed alright.

Let’s work through this together. It could be fun!

Here’s what we want – a brew session less than two hours long from set-up to clean-up. That’s about half the time usually spent brewing a basic beer. So let’s break it down and see where we can trim some time. We’ll be looking at a 3.5 quart batch because I like to brew in small amounts and it seems like fun to be able to come home from work and throw together a little beer. At least it seems fun to me. Anyway, here’s what a typical session looks like:

Set-up – 30 minutes
This includes getting out all the equipment, measuring and crushing the grains and measuring the strike water.
Heat strike water – 10 minutes
Get the strike water to about 170F for dough-in.
Mash – 60 minutes
This includes stirring to break up dough balls before closing the mash tun.
Mash-out / vorlauf / drain – 5 minutes
Dumping some 180+F water into the mash tun, stirring it up, recirculating about 1 or 2 quarts and draining into the boil. kettle
Sparge – 15 minutes
Dumping some 175F water into the mash tun, stirring, waiting 10 or so minutes, recirculating and draining.
Boil – 75 minutes
It takes 10 – 15 minutes to get a good hot break. Then the 60 minutes boil starts.
Chill and pitch yeast- 20 minutes
My homemade immersion chiller gets the wort from boiling to 65F in about 20 minutes.
Clean up – 15 minutes
A lot of cleaning can be done during the boiling and chilling, but some stuff is left to do and then everything needs to be put away. I’m anal that way.

If you’ve been keeping track that’s a total of 3 hours and 50 minutes. And that’s if everything goes smoothly (which it usually does but if my brother happens to be brewing with me we can throw in an extra hour of drinking, Guitar Hero III and general lazing about). Now I’m not saying that those 4 hours aren’t fun. If they weren’t I wouldn’t continue to do it. I could just buy beer. I’m just saying that it would be nice to cut that in about half and be able to do this on a Tuesday night if the mood strikes, that’s all.

So in my reading I found that some people have had success shortening the mash time to 20 minutes. Sounds crazy, right? Maybe. There are potential problems with fermentability and efficiency, but I figure we can tweak the process to accommodate those. I also read some stuff about no-sparge brewing. What if I combine them? And what would happen if I shortened the boil, too? I could make up for hop utilization with some more hops at different times. I mean, we’re talking about very small amounts anyway since we’re only making 3.5 quarts of beer. Let’s try this!

Here is the recipe I used:

Crazy Short Pale Ale Take 1

Batch size – 3.5 quarts

1.75 lbs Domestic 2-row
2.5 oz Crystal 40L
0.125 oz Magnum @ 40 minutes
0.083 oz Perle @ 20 minutes
0.083 oz Fuggles @ 0 minutes
Whatever ale yeast you have on hand

The plan was to mash at 152 for 20 minutes. Then I’d heat up more water and mash out with enough water so that the first runnings would give me the full amount of wort that I’d need. The boil would only be 40 minutes and the bittering hops were adjusted accordingly. I actually did this last night and as I went I wrote down the time. Let’s see how I did:

9:45 – Set up
Get out the equipment, measure grains and water, start crushing.
10:04 – Start strike water
I timed this so that I’d be done crushing the grains when the water hit the dough-in temperature. Used 2.5 quarts of strike water.
10:11 – Dough-in
Timed well. The only problem was that the temperature dropped less than usual and I actually threw in some ice and cold water to cool down the mash. It took an extra few minutes, but I counted that all towards the mash time.
10:31 – Mash-out / vorlauf / drain
Mashed out with 2.5 quarts of water, recirculated 2 quarts, and drained. I had a stuck sparge at the end that was solved by just mixing the remaining mash, recirculating another quart and draining again. Not too bad.
10:38 – Start the boil
10:50 – Start the clock
The hot break began to dissipate and in went the 40-minute bittering hops.
11:10 – Next hop addition
Flavor hops, a pinch of Irish moss and the chiller all went into the pot.
11:30 – Flame out
Toss in the aroma hops and start the chiller.
12:00 – Pitch the yeast.
The chiller needed to be adjusted for the small pot so it took a little longer than expected to hit 65F. But it got there. Then the wort went into an old Carlo Rossi jug, a hydrometer sample was taken and the yeast was dumped in. The sample read 1.032. You read that right. 1.032. That’s WAY low. I was expecting 1.052. Was it the short mash? Probably. But I didn’t expect the efficiency to drop that low. That’s crazy.
12:15 – Finish cleaning
This was just cleaning out the boil kettle and putting the mash tun away. Everything else was cleaned during the boil.

So the whole endeavor took 2 1/2 hours and resulted in a really weak and probably not very tasty beer. But who can say?

What did we learn from all this? The short mash may have caused some VERY low efficiency. Is it worth it? Not sure. I guess if I really wanted to I could just increase the grain bill to make up for it. Maybe I’ll try that out. On the other hand, I could try increasing the mash time in 5 or 10 minute increments and see what that gets me. I could do a 60 minute mash and take a gravity sample every so often and see where the practical cut-off is. But that’s a lot of work. And what about the 40 minute boil? We’ll have to wait to taste the beer. I wouldn’t recommend a short boil for just any beer. My “research” tells me that some grains should be boiled longer than others. I figured for a pale ale using domestic 2-row that wouldn’t sit on the shelf too long it was worth a shot. I’ll let you know when I taste it.

There you have it. My first experiment with a shortened brew session. I haven’t planned my next iteration yet, but I’ll be sure to post it when I do.