Pre-Questions about my first brew day

[Brewbear]

Since you are doing a partial boil, you might consider taking a gallon or so of water and putting it in the freezer for a few hours. I found out that I save some time in cooling if I mix the almost frozen water with the still hot wort, getting to pitching temp quicker.

Cheers,
Brewbear

[Biff]

I forgot I needed to vote here. Hehehe, My first brew day weighed in at around 8 hours. With all the stuff I learned I'm sure I can cut that near in-half.

The biggest thing that killed me was lag time between the boil and pitch. Rough outline:

- 8am topoff water boil
- 11am started boil
- 12:15pm finished boil
- 3:30 (around there, don't have my document in front of me), pitched

So yeah, If I boiled my topoff water the night before, and stored it chilled I could cut at least 4.5 hours off the process. That puts me in the 3 - 3.5 hour range.

Very good -- I love learning all this stuff. Thanks again for all the great tips/advice/help

[Brewbear]

Just a couple of things i found helpful:
Invest in a bucket with a spigot for bottling,
Invest in a bottling cane, the one with a spring in the tip, not the gravity one,
Make-up the entire volume (wort and top-off water), pitch the yeast and then split in the 2 buckets to ensure even yeast distribution,
Sanitize, sanitize, sanitize
Dunk your wort chiller in a bucket of water and PWB, the pipe will have residual oils on it
My first brew day was about 4.5 hours....6 batches or so later (and a new propane later) i managed 3 batches 5 gallons each, full boil in 6.5 hours
The trick was the new burner (from steinfillers) and getting used to the process.

Cheers,
Brewbear

[Homegrown Hops]

What I found helpful was skip the bottling and the bullshit that goes with it and just get right on to kegging. You can get a beer gun or CPF later on to make samples for friends and competitions.

HH