1 Wort, 3 Beers, 12 hours brewing!

[ColmR]

Hi brewers,
I thought I had an amazing idea last week to do one mash and brew three different beers in three pots. So for one days work I'd get three smaller batches of different beers instead of one big batch of the same beer. Hoping then to have three new beers ready for the National Championships. Genius right?

It was way tougher than I thought and it took a full 12 hours of my Sunday (including cleanup).

So I was wondering if any of you have suggestions or schedules for doing something like this? Here is my plan and what I did. Love to hear your comments/suggestions.

In total I would brew to end up with around 23.5 litres of beer using Jamil's recipes as a base.
[list bull-blackball]

• 10L of an IPA brewed in a 30L pot to ferment in a 15L bucket.

[list bull-blackball]

• 10L of an Irish Red brewed in a 10L pot to ferment in a demijohn.

[list bull-blackball]

• 3.5L of a Robust Porter brewed in a 19L pot to ferment in a 15L bucket.

All brewed on my kitched hob as I normally do.

So I chose Marris Otter as a base grain for all three and the other common ingredient was a light Crystal (80 EBC), so that's what I mashed.  I then steeped some other specialty malts for the Red and the Porter to add to the pot. The required OG for the Porter and the IPA were the same but I wanted a bit lower for the Red, so I'd dilute the mash runnings.

So the mash went as normal. Sparge took a while, but it got there. Then split the wort and combined with the specialty malt teas. Preboil OGs were pretty much spot on.

Then I made my biggest error. I tried to bring the wort in all three pots to the boil at the same time. I wanted to stagger the boils but I still thought it would be smart to get the 3 worts up to boiling temp. Don't know why I did this as the pots barely fit on the 5 ring gas hob. There just wasn't the power in the cooker to heat up all that wort across those three large pots. So after a lot of trying and messing I eventually took the biggest pot off and left it aside to go ahead and boil the other two, staggering as I had originally planned. Then when I was chilling the first wort, I put the third back on the heat.

Went through the rest of the process reasonably alright but my post boil gravities were way off in the end on all three beers. For the first beer, the boil wasn't rigorous enough.  But for the second and third beer with all the heating, checking, taking off the heat, putting back on, moving around, there was way more boil off than I expected. So my OG was too high on both the Red and the porter and a little too low on the IPA. I left the porter and IPA as was but on the red I boiled and cooled some water and diluted the wort to get the OG down to an acceptable level (extra work ).

With all this madness and extra pots and stuff to clean I wasn't finished my brewday til after midnight.

I should probably say never again. But, I'd love to get a rhythm together to be able to brew 2 or 3 beers like this on the same day. Any of you do anything like this? Successfully?

[Padraic]

I normally brew two beers in a day which takes around 8-9 hours but that's with 2 full mash's, full batches.

I like the idea of doing a large mash and splitting the wort into a few small batches to make single hop ipa's. But I think this project won't get off it's feet until later in the year, and might end up being a capital brewers brewday!

I think it's rewarding to get two brews in the one day, I always find I'm disappointed when I get one brew out of a brewday! I think two brews makes it more worthwhile!

I've never tried it with your method of steeping grains and would be interested to try this out.

The reason for not hitting your target og might have been that you were using the later runnings from the mash in that pot, from what i gatehr the runnings are higher gravity at the start and lower gravity at the end. Can anyone confirm this?

[newToBrew]

I did something similar before crimbo -

a stout and a pale ale - mashed @ 10 gallons worth  of MO & Crystal ect. ( grains common to both )
Cold Steeped the Stout Specific Grains  the night before - so had that 'tea' ready by the time the mash was finished
I have an electric kettle ( 30 gal bucket - 2 elements)

time wise it worked quiet well - maybe an extra hour or two on top of a singe brew time 
I ended up boiling off a lot of the wort and got higher gravities on both than I wanted but that was more down to me coming to grips with my equipment more so than anything else.
think I may have been Chilling one while I was bringing the 2nd up to boil - so had some extra equipment to clean at the end extra pots & buckets

Anyway - I think its worth sticking to and refining the process as you can  come out with some radically  different beers if you plan ahead   

[ColmR]

Glad to hear that more of you are thinking along these lines.

With regards to the mash runnings, I collected all in a single vessel and then transferred to the brewing pots. So my pre boil gravities were bang on.

Interesting to hear newToBrew mention that his post boil gravities were also high. It is definitely process in my case anyway.

[JimmyM]

I assume you took temp into account when you measured the gravity?
Doesnt that have an effect?

[ColmR]

Yip, did indeed... Just had too long and too vigorous of a boil.

[newToBrew]

Interesting to hear newToBrew mention that his post boil gravities were also high. It is definitely process in my case anyway.

it wasnt just this occasion - its happened to me a few times - i have two elements and whil ei do knock off one after it hits the rolling boil - i do seem to lose quiet a few litres to evaporation - which lead to the high gravities - so on my last brew i had some pre boiled water ready to top up with also only did a 45 min boil i think - that gave me an average gravity

maybe on my next one I may start knocking off the single  element  through out th eboil - we'll see

edit

bang together a kettle - sounds like the stove thing was a lot of hassle