bergerandfries wrote:Goober, imagining a quicker runoff out of the bag, what kind of time does your session take?
Here is about how my session runs:
30 minutes to get out my equipment, make sure it is all clean, assemble my water filter and start filling the pot. Ill put some heat on the pot once I have a few inches of water in it, aiming to control my water speed and my heat to get to my volume at about my temps. I run the water slowly through the filter because we have bad chlorine, so going slowly through the carbon is essential. A pencil thick stream take a while to fill 10 gallons.
90 minutes: Mash. This time I put the grain all in the bag dry, then stuffed the bag into the pot, tied the string to the spigot to keep it from falling in and attacked it with the mash paddle to break up dough balls. Much less dough balls than before. I had to heat a bit too because I lost about 5 degrees from the gain, not 2.
30 minutes: Mash out and "sparging". I light the fire and it takes a good 10 minutes just to go from 155 up to about 165. I don't want to heat too quickly right away. I give it a good stir and start pulling the bag once I see 163 or so. It took me more than 30 minutes to drain the bag, so this was closer to 45 minutes total sparging. But I am already heating the pot and by the time I was done draining the bag, the wort was about 200 degrees. Which makes for sweaty, steamy work when it was 90 degrees outside that day, heavy lifting over the pot.
90 minute boil. Ill do 1 hour boils sometimes, but I had the time and was going for higher gravity this time, so I made sure to push the boil right up to 90 minutes, but I ran out of gas 5 minutes from the end. Good timing!
30 minutes to cool down to about 92 degrees or so. I have 80 to 82 degree tap water, so cooling isn't the easiest for me. I then run the wort into the carboy, take it inside and put it in an icebath in the sink for another hour to get it down to the 73 to 75 degrees for yeast pitching.
30 minutes: Assorted cleanup, record keeping, notes taking, etc. I have to wash the keg, dump the grain on the garden, wash the bag, etc. The bag takes about 5 minutes to wash off, turn inside out, wash off again, turn it back the right way and hose again. It was black when I started and the hose made it white again. I was amazed that it wasn't stained at all.
Most of the "regular" brewing stuff is still going to take time, but I expected that. What saves me the most time is that I don't have to clean two more pieces of equipment (well, a HLT doesn't really need much cleaning) and I only monitoring ONE temp, not mash and HLT spargewater. I can also heat the mash directly to step up temps without scorching a thick mash. Oh, and all of my ALL-GRAIN brewing equipment fits inside the boil keggle. The bag, immersion chiller, water filter, everything except my massive mash paddle.
