I have the opposite problem because there is no water or sink in my garage. I store everything in the garage and brew (electric) in the kitchen, so I spend the first half of the day bringing everything from the garage into the kitchen and the second half putting everything back. I generally brew on days when my wife works, so I start after she finishes breakfast and my goal is to have the kitchen cleaned up so that by the time she gets home the only way she can tell that I brewed beer is by the smell. This week I couldn’t find anyone else to help so I brewed on her day off and she helped me. It gave her a renewed appreciation for what is involved, especially in the cleaning up.
I used to lug everything up from the basement to the deck, brew, clean, then lug everything back. It was a pain and I began to dread brewday. So, I negotiated a small niche in the laundry room and moved in. Everything is right there along with a sink for cooling and cleaning.
I start early so by the time she’s awake I can tend to her easily without interrupting a critical process.
My wife realized a long time ago that when I’m brewing, I’m busy. She only shows up in the brewery to ask if I’m going eat lunch with the family or for emergencies she and the kids can’t handle. Brewing time is Dad’s time, leave him alone.
I do the same for her as much as possible.
“Give what you would like to get” has worked for me over the last 32 years of marriage and a lot of other situations.
I use furniture dollies to move my boil kettle around.
Setup my brew area and treat the water the night before and start early. I always brew 2 batches each time I brew since getting time is difficult.
My shop/brewery is a walkout basement with a large storage room so everything is on the same set of shelves.
Lots of little things add up to a smooth, repeatable process. Someday I may move inside completely and dedicate a space but for now it works well for me.
Paul
I brew upstairs cuz the gas cooktop is in the upstairs kitchen, but I store most of the equipment and do all the cellaring downstairs so every brew involves a butt-load of trips up and down the stairs. When I have my excrement assembled I can minimize the trips by taking one thing back down the stairs when I’m fetching some other thing from down yonder. When my poop isn’t well grouped I make a lot of unnecessary trips. The worst trip is always the one packing 7 gallons of beer down a VERY steep stairway the has a 180* a third of the way down.
As for honey-do interruptions, my wife fortunately decided to stop being my wife about 25 years ago, so I’m excellent in that regard. That also means I don’t have to beg/negotiate for space of equipment :-), it also means I can listen to whatever I want, as loud as I want.
Like a lot of the others I measure and mill grain and bring up as much equipment as possible the evening before brew day, but brew day still is never less than 5 hours, for a double batch of very high gravity/ high % adjunct beers brew day can last 16 hours or more. On those day I’m REALLY gald when I finally finish and can crack a bottle.
Man, our situations and strategies sound almost identical. I’m not even considering changing my arrangement though. All the up and down – as I say, beer is my exercise program!
All is done in my garage with the exception of turning on the water to the garage at the basement sink (the line to the garage was an afterthought - PEX line that has a garden hose QDC). The garage is a second garage and virtually dedicated (8 months of the year) as my brewery and brew pub. In the winter months I rearrange it so I can put my truck inside. I occasionally brew 5 gallon ales, which I will lug into the house or basement to ferment.
I guess I am lucky. We added a new garage to the house about 15 years ago and closed in to old garage so we could have a bigger bedroom that could accommodate a crib for future grandkids that came along almost 8 years ago (planning ahead, ya know). Although I do get inundated with honey-do projects, my wife, Sue, felt sorry for me having to haul water 250 feet to the barn, brew the beer while freezing my proverbial backside off in the winter, hauling 10 gallons of wort back to the house and down the basement steps to my fermenter and clean up with cold water from a 250 foot long garden hose in both summer and winter months. She told me I could have a small area in the old closed in garage as my brewery with hot and cold running water and a walk-in cooler (I love this lady). She pretty much leaves me to my devices on brew days except for asking the repeated question “when are you brewing my Amarillo IPA and/or when will it be ready to drink?”
Other than the up/down stuff I’m pretty happy with my set-up, a lot of folks have it far worse. A couple changes I need to make are making room somewhere to get the grain storage out of the fermentation room, and get an exhaust fan installed in the kitchen before next winter. After a marathon the batch weekend in sub-zero weather last winter I spent most of a day washing wort condensate off the walls upstairs and the stairwell, where the condensate was really bad.
I have a nice finished garage with heating and cooling, but even if it did have sewer and running water there’s no way in hell I’d convert it to a brewery, that’s my wood shop and it’s every bit as sacrosanct as the brewery is ;D.
The humidity changes from a brewery would wreak havoc on a woodworking shop. They definitely are not compatible.
Humidity in these parts is a very transient phenomenon, but the dust from a woodshop would be disastrous for the brewery.
Going electric Saved a Tonna time for me. Just being able to set mash temperatures and a nice steady boil instead of dealing with natural gas or propane. Plus it heats way faster. I also measure everything out the night before so grain is ready to mash and my hops are vacuum sealed and ready for each time to drop them in the boil. I just wish I could figure out a way to clean everything quicker and easier. That’s the biggest pain in the ass for me is cleaning everything after the close up my fermenter.
You too can be a brewer: if you like to clean and wait.
I do a 4-5 hour yeast vitality starter. That means I have 1 1/2 to 2 hours before I mash in. I heat the strike water with a sous vide and use the rest of the time before dough in to do all the measuring, calibrating, crushing, making sanitizer. I do a 30 minute mash (BIAB) and then wheel my kettle out to the driveway for the boil. I do enjoy brewing outside, I’m weird that way.
I brew in the garage on an induction burner, but I fill the kettle the night before and leave on the stove in the house. When I get up in the morning I tirn on the stove and then have breakfast while the water heats up. I’ve gone from one end of the spectrum to the other (Mr Beer too a two vessel recirculating mash tun w/propane burner), now I biab into a keg to ferment (no chill), then to a serving keg…easy peezee!