How do we find time to brew?

When Mike and I tell people we are homebrewers, we are often asked how we find time to brew. We are both full-time teachers, so we have to prioritize and make time for brewing. Over the last 10 years, we have had moments when it seemed like we were brewing every weekend and moments when it seemed like we never had time to brew. When the COVID quarantine hit, we were unable to brew for months mostly because the quarantine happened to coincide with a major kitchen remodel. The timing of our kitchen demo was unfortunate. We demolished our kitchen the week before the world shutdown from COVID, found termites in our brewhouse, AND were forced to move all of our classes online. Basically, due to circumstances beyond our control, we had to shut down our brewing for about 6 months. When the 2022 New Year started, we decided we wanted to focus our efforts on brewing. Mike and I both live our lives without regrets, and we didn’t want homebrewing to become a shoulda, woulda, coulda hobby in our life. We spent much of the COVID quarantine at home and sampled a variety of beers. Most of our reactions to the beers we tasted were, “We could make that” or “Why don’t we make that?” 

So, how do we go about finding the time to work full-time in stressful careers, enjoy quality time together and with friends, enjoy hobbies besides brewing, and spend time with our two wonderfully goofy greyhounds?

Some pics of our kitchen remodel that paused our brewing. It was an experience we hope we don't have to repeat--nothing like two teachers teaching two classes simultaneously on Zoom while in the middle of a kitchen remodel. Did I mention the restaurants closed while we had no kitchen? 0 stars...do not recommend. 

Prioritize brewing & brew tasks

Mike and I have more hobbies than time. We golf, surf, paddleboard, hike, travel, camp, and a long list of other activities. Mike and I decided we needed to cut down on some of our activities and only focus on a few. We decided we needed to devote most weekends to brewing and some weekends to our other hobbies. During the week, we often turn off the tv and tinker in the brewery. We break the cleaning tasks into multiple small chores rather than a whole day. We may spend one night cleaning beer lines, and another night racking over a beer to kegs. Teaching can make you feel like a zombie.  After a long day it's easy to just crash on the couch and drown yourself in beer when you know you should be taking steps to brew more.  We are trying to focus more on our overall health, so we have the energy to do brew tasks on the weekdays and free up more weekend time to brew. 

Some time saving tips:

• Rinse fermenters immediately with water. Make sure there is no visual sign of use. Clean with PBW and sanitize on brew day before using them. 
  
• Rinse kegs the same way you rinse fermenters. Use a keg washer to clean and sanitize multiple kegs. We often do this while we are working on yard work or cleaning the house.
  
• Let TC clamps and valves sit overnight in PBW, rinse, and dry immediately. Make sure your clamps are organized by size and/or task to help find them easily the next time you brew. 
  
• Clean the brew kettles immediately after brewing. Our brew kettles are always ready to go. 
  
• Stop sweating over the hot side sanitation! The consensus from talking with other homebrewers at the Craft LB Festival is that most brewers overly sanitize everything on the hot side. The boiling of the wort will kill most everything. Keep it clean but don’t waste your time overly fixated on every nook and cranny. Instead, focus your time and sanitation efforts where it counts most–the cold side!
  
• Label all of your brewing equipment. Put your equipment back in the same location every time! We stopped wasting our time searching for equipment now that it is in the same location every time. We bought a Dymo label machine and now we don't waste 20 minutes looking for things.
  
• Keep track of your kegs and how much of each beer you have. Make sure you make a “competition” keg of your beer. Label that keg and don’t drink off it until AFTER you have bottled/canned for competition.
  
• Make larger batches of beers you know your friends love to drink. Instead of brewing the same beer twice in a month, brew it once and have extra kegs of it. It takes about the same amount of time to brew a 5 gallon batch as a 20 gallon batch. Maximize your brew days by prioritizing larger batches of beer with smaller batches of new beer. Have shareable beer on hand with your experimental batches. 
  
• Make a beer calendar and schedule out your brew days around holidays, events, and other activities. 
  
• This is a tough one, but you don’t have to share EVERY beer you make with friends/family. Have a sour or saison you made that not everyone will like or understand? Save it for yourself to enjoy. Enter that beer in competitions. When your beer wins a competition, let your friends/family sample your award winning beer! They are more likely to be open minded about something new that has won an award than something new that hasn’t. 
  
• Split the cleaning tasks with your brew partner. Mike and I focus on different aspects of cleaning and maintaining the brewhouse. By splitting the tasks, we can stretch our time more and spend more time together. 
  
• Do an hour of work a day versus one entire day of cleaning. I HATE cleaning. I can easily set a timer for an hour after work and focus on something vs. devoting an entire Saturday to cleaning. 
  
• Incorporate brew cleaning with house cleaning tasks. I often mop the brewery floor on the same day I mop the bathroom and kitchen floors. Also, I clean brewery glassware while I’m cleaning the kitchen. Doubling up on the tasks helps to maximize your time. 
  
• Reward yourself with something fun when you have tasks you hate doing. There’s always a task that you don’t like to do in the brewery. Maybe it is keg cleaning day or beer line cleaning. When you accomplish those tasks, reward yourself with something you love doing…sample a new beer, bike ride to a brewery, and so on. You will look forward to that task you hate when you know you have a great reward waiting for you.

EQUIPMENT

While we saved time with our cleaning regime, we still realized we were brewing more frequently than we wanted to be brewing. That may sound strange since we are talking about our love of brewing. But, we found we were brewing the same beers over and over with little time to experiment on new creations. The result was we upped our brewing system. We now have the capacity for a variety of brewing needs. We can brew 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, or 30 gallon batches. Most frequently, we brew either 10 or 20 gallons. We upgraded to a one barrel brewhouse (i.e., 50 gallon pots). When we upgraded, we decided to keep our older setup. So, we have 6 brew kettles instead of 3. 

1. 5, 10, 15 Gallon Setup. 
   
   1. Kettles: We have two 22 gallon pots and a 15 gallon pot all from Brew Built. We have false bottoms for both the 22 and 15 gallon pot. This gives us the flexibility to adjust which pots we use as the HLT, Mash Tun, and Brew kettles. 
      
   2. Sparge Arm and Whirlpool: We have the Ultimate Sparge Arm from MoreBeer and the Exchilerator Whirlpool arm (standard size they sell). 
      
2. 20, 25, 30 Gallon Setup. 
   
   1. Kettles: We have two 50 gallon Brew Built pots for the Mash Tun and Brew Kettles and a 50 Gallon SS Brewtech kettle as our HLT. With our setup, we place the HLT in the middle of our brew cart, and we like that the SS Brewtech kettle has the handles in the front and back of the pot. This allows the pots to fit on our existing brew cart.
      
   2. Sparge Arm and Whirlpool: We use a custom sized Exchilerator Sparge Arm and Whirlpool for our kettles. If you email Exchilerator your specs, they will price out the custom sizes for you. 
      
3. For both systems:
   
   1. Wood brew cart, burners, and RIMS tube. We store the larger 50 gallon pots on the brew cart when not in use and the smaller pots on a garage shelving unit behind the brew cart. 
      
   2. Exchilerator Brutus counterflow wort chillers. We have two of these. For most batches, we use one wort chiller. However, in the summer or on very hot days, we do run two wort chillers in succession to help the wort chill even faster. 
      
   3. Fermenters. We have three 7.5 gallon SS Brewbuckets, six half barrel Sanke Keg fermenters (these we custom welded and call Beer Bots), and two 1 barrel SS Brewtech Chronical fermenters. 
      
   4. Glychol Chillers: We have the ability to use our glychol chillers with all of our fermentation vessels. One chiller is dedicated to the large Chronical fermenters and the other chiller is connected to our keg wraps. The keg wraps have an extension so that they fit around the Sanke kegs. However, if you remove the extension, the wraps work perfectly with the Brewbuckets. 
      
   5. Dry hopper: We recently made a 2 inch dry hopper that works on all of our fermentation vessels. 
      
   6. Keg Storage: To help us maximize our brew time, we have two working keezers and two storage keezers. Our new large storage keezers helps us store our large batch beers and keeps them on C02. This really gives us the ability to brew less frequently and always have beer on hand. 
      

Mike and I rarely get rid of our equipment. Instead, we multipurpose everything. Our original cooler mash tun and HLTs we still use. In fact, we use them for cleanup…they work great for PBW and Star Sans buckets on brew days. The only items we have gotten rid of are glass carboys. I sold our old glass carboys to a co-worker who was getting into brewing. We repurpose things because we live in a 1950s house with 888 square feet. Thank goodness we have a two car garage and a storage shed to house things!

Calendars & Time management

We keep a shared calendar on Google for brew days and competition dates. We plan out which brews will go to each competition and plan out when we need to brew, bottle or can, and ship each competition beer. Once we have these on the calendar for the year, we then revolve our brew days around the schedule. If you aren’t familiar with Google Calendar, it makes our lives so much easier! I color code our tasks and set them for specific timelines. For example, if you want to clean your beer lines every two weeks, you can set a task reminder in Google Calendar and put it on repeat. Mike and I share our Two Jacks Brewing Company gmail account, so we just push the account to our phone and get easy reminders. 

Every Tuesday I devote time to writing this blog. I just block off time during my duty free lunch and begin the blog. I finish the blog after work, insert pictures, and post at home on Tuesday evening. I don’t answer the phone and ignore all work related emails and phone calls during my lunch break. On my work calendar, it is blocked off as “busy” during every Tuesday lunch. While the blog takes a lot of time to put together, I find that I look forward to having some time to myself to focus on it. The writing motivates me to keep up with the brewery and appreciate the hard work we put into our brewing. 

Recipe writing is something I continually do. I sometimes think of a recipe or Mike and I come up with a recipe while at dinner or beer tasting. We actually write a lot of beer recipes while talking in the car. I have access to Beersmith on my phone, so I will immediately write down some of the ideas into a recipe that I finish up while watching TV, when I can’t sleep, or during my work lunch break. I like to research and read about the history of beers, brewing processes, new hops, and so on. After researching, I often create a new recipe based on the information I find. Currently, I have about 20 recipes sitting in Beersmith that I recently created and haven’t brewed. We may never use all of the recipes, but I know that I have access to some new recipes that I spent time thinking over. This allows Mike and I to look over new recipes when we can’t decide what to brew next and just have a “go with your current mood” attitude and pick one. This is how our Haleiwa Island Lager was created. Mike and I went to sushi and said, “I wonder what a hopped up rice lager would taste like.” I took notes on it that night and then wrote the Haleiwa recipe after researching how to brew with rice. 

Social media posts I try to update around the same times every day. Typically, I will post something before work, during my lunch break, or at night. Sometimes I find I spend too much time on social media, so I try to shut down my phone or have a Sunday phone free day. I like having Instagram and Facebook posts to commemorate our experience with the brewery and to gain new brewing techniques from other brewers. My favorite part of FB is when memories pop up. These help us remember how far we have come and gives us motivation to keep evolving as homebrewers. I also love seeing other brewers’ setups. Hearing what other brewers are doing and seeing them win medals in competitions has given us the confidence to enter into contests and try to become the best brewers we can. The brewing community is really about learning and growing and sharing your accomplishments. There are also a lot of products we have seen and gotten feedback on by following other brewers.

Less time cleaning and maintaining the brewery equals more time we get to enjoy together. 

Basically, the answer to “How do you find time to brew?” is we make time and decided that we wanted to prioritize brewing. It helps that both Mike and I love brewing and enjoy spending our time doing this together. You may need to be even more diligent with your planning out of time and calendaring if your partner doesn't also brew. However, communicating your brewing schedule and priorities will make your brewing more efficient, even if you only brew once every few months. Just fit the brewing into your lifestyle. We have some work weeks where we just can’t brew because of other commitments. That’s totally fine. We just prioritize the other weeks instead. Just keep brewing!

Cheers! 
​2JBC